Let’s participate in a role-playing exercise. Pretend you work at an agency. One of your satisfied clients just called. Her best friend just started a personal injury law firm. Good news: thanks to your impeccable track record and a persuasive referral, a client just effortlessly landed in your lap, sight unseen. Way to go.
Here’s the thing. Your job starts now. First things first. You need to get your new client’s Google Business Profile Listing verified.
Nothing can go wrong. You need to go about this in the most risk-averse manner imaginable. This listing’s status can’t get stuck in pending. Nothing is certain when it comes to Google Business Profile, of course, but you can give yourself the best chance of success. Let’s talk about how you’d do that.
The purpose of this blog post is to help you set up a Google Business Profile location in a way that avoids as many potential landmines as possible. The goal here is to get a listing verified as quickly as you can with the smallest odds of encountering an issue of any kind. Capeesh?
The first thing you need to do is claim the business on your client’s behalf. No sweat. Navigate your way through the forms you encounter– enter the name of the business, the street address, the phone number, and so forth. After you’ve submitted the pertinent business attributes, you’ll then be prompted to finish the process.
This is where Google will ask you if you’d like to verify the business by receiving a postcard in the mail. Depending on where you live in the world, you may also see choices to complete verification by phone or email. Whatever option you’re presented with, the point of this blog post is that you should not select any of those options. Not yet, anyway.
Underneath the suggested verification method, you’ll see a line of text that says “more options.” Expand that. After you do, you’ll see a previously hidden selection that says “verify later.” That’s the option you want to go with.
Before we continue, it’s important that something is made clear to you. The verification method we’re describing is institutional knowledge that made its way to Local Viking by way of a Google support representative. We were told that the rationale behind this method’s comparative success was unknown, but we were given confirmation that it was indeed a more dependable way of ensuring that your new location will not get stranded in pending status.
Pressing on, after you select “verify later,” you will be prompted to enter additional details about the new listing. You can then continue giving Google information: the business hours, the business description, and business photos, for example. In fact, you will be able to interact with the GBP dashboard despite the fact that the listing isn’t yet verified.
If you navigate your way to the Business Info section, you will discover that you can enter information for every single field that you have relevant information about, including things that were not part of the initial wizard, like special hours, products, the business website, and services. Fill out every field you possibly can.
After comprehensively adding as many particulars as you can conceive of, you then want to have Google Business Profile send its postcard with the verification PIN to the street address you specified for the business. Adding this information before you prompt Google to verify the location by mail drastically reduces the odds of your listing getting stuck in Google limbo.
We hope this information is helpful to you. We’ll see you again next week.
