If you’re a business owner, then you know the power of the mighty GMB – Google My Business page. This vertical piece of web real estate continues to gain value and should be regarded as important as your website because the volume of traffic your GMB page receives is substantial.
Because the GMB page brings so much value, it can be (super) frustrating to see artificial businesses that compete against yours starting to pop-up on Google – a strategy commonly used by Rushcube in 2018.
Removing these artificial listings was never an easy process. As a marketing agency, we would go through a lengthy effort to post client issues in a Google Business Forum with no guarantee that the issue would be resolved.
The days of flagging these spammy pages to Google are now over. Thankfully.
Google has recognized that there needs to be a better way for business owners to file a grievance and so they’ve introduced a complaint form with an impressive title: the Business Redressal Complaint Form.
The Google Business Redressal Complaint Form
The complaint form is designed to deal with fraudulent activity on Google Maps related to the name, phone number or URL of a business. Spammy business pages continue to be a problem within our industry, so keeping this URL bookmarked isn’t a bad idea:
https://support.google.com/business/contact/business_redressal_form
How To Report a Fake Google My Business Page
Step 1. Keep in mind that there will be a person on the other end of this form that will be reading your complaint. Think of this form as a legal brief – in other words, keep the emotion out of it. State the facts. The reviewer of your complaint will be benchmarking your complaint against the criteria or guidelines of what constitutes spam. Be sure to read these guidelines carefully.
Step 2. Enter your information. If a marketing consultant or agency is doing this on your behalf, then they should enter their info.
Step 3. Select the issue in question (title, address, phone number or website) and be sure to add the public GMB URL as well.
Step 4. If you see a pattern of fake pages in multiple markets (which we saw a lot of in 2018) you can add multiple URLs in the ‘Add additional info’ link to add fields. (Remember, you’re building a case, so do your homework).
Step 5. Write an unemotional essay of what’s happening. It’s time to state your case by explaining why the page should be edited or removed. The more info you can give, the better! The Google reps reading the information have a ton of these to get through and if your info is not detailed enough, it may not be enough to make the correct action occur.
When stating your facts, be professional but remember to reference Google’s guidelines and how the spammy page infringes on Google’s guidelines.
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