Your Business Profile Has Been Suspended – Fix With One Document

Okay, today we’re going to talk about fixing a suspended Google My Business profile. For anybody who has a GMB listing, this is something that you will definitely come across one day. It can be triggered from something as simple as changing your phone number, and that can trigger the suspension of the profile, especially if you change it to and from within a couple of days. If you make a mistake and then you go back and change it again, that instantly will flag it and a good chance you’ll get suspended.

So, I’ll walk you through my usual process, which works 99% of the time for profiles that have been suspended due to just automatic reasons. But obviously, if you’re doing something nefarious like setting up more than one listing for a business, this might not work. But for all genuine businesses out there, this works a treat.

So, you’ll no doubt receive an email to the account holder, and that’ll look something like this. I’ve blurred out the business name here, but everything else is pretty much generic. Your next step after receiving this email is to click on the ‘Submit a Referral Review,’ which will take you to this page. And then it’s just a matter of going through and answering the questions and making sure number one, that you’re logged into the Google profile that holds that or at least manages that GMB. So, make sure you’re logged in. If you’re the owner, no doubt it’ll be your main account for Google that you use all the time. If you’re an agency, hopefully, you need to have shared access to it; otherwise, it may not work. So, you want to try and tick all the boxes with Google and make sure everything’s covered to make it as automated and as seamless as possible. If something’s missing, then it’ll probably get flagged, and you’ll have to go through the whole process again and also produce more proof that the business is a genuine business and that either you own it or whatnot.

So, after ticking all those questions, I’ve found the best method, and this is the gold sort of nugget which gets me across the line all the time, is making sure you prove that the business is actually a real business by attaching some sort of document, some sort of proof. And I found that the best thing to use is a record of registration of a business name. Generally, these have all the information that Google needs. So, it’ll have the name, even the ABN number if you’re in Australia, of the owner. It’ll have the registered address for the business because it has everything that Google needs to be able to prove that that is a real business. So, even though you might have produced this before to Google, it works really well producing this again, giving it to them again. And I’m not too sure if it’s an automated process that actually automatically scans this document or if it’s a manual process. Sometimes I wonder, it could go both ways. I just had to help a client recently who got suspended due to changing a phone number twice in three days. That profile has never been suspended ever before. We’ve never submitted anything like this to them before. It was created back in the days when it was nice and easy, and you didn’t have to provide too many documents or any recordings or anything like that to prove that it’s a real business. Anyway, it got flagged, it got suspended, and we produced this document. And then we got an automated reply, and then we’ve got another reply from Google about two days later, saying that they needed some more documents. So, we literally just attached the same document that we did initially and emailed it back to them. And then the next day, 12 hours later, it was back online. So, offering this document works a treat.

So, I’d imagine there’d be something similar that you can get when you register a business name around the world. This is the document that we get in Australia by ASIC when you register the business name. So, this I have found is the best way to get your GMB business profile unsuspended and back online. So, hopefully that helps, and good luck! Cheers.”

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Chris Andrew

Digital Marketer - Owner of Andrew Digital