What Should You Do If You Have Duplicate Google My Business Listings?

Suppose you recently moved to a new place XYZ and you decide to order pasta for dinner. You go to Google browser and search for “best pasta in XYZ.”

On the search results page, you see numerous restaurants and cafes representing the best pasta in XYZ. So now, how do you pick one?

You go through their reviews and ratings. According to research from Think With Google, around 88% of customers trust online reviews just as much as they trust a personal recommendation.

But that’s not all; you will probably also take the convenience factor into account. You’ll think of a lot of things like is the restaurant open till late or not? What is their exact location? What are their hours of operation?

After considering all of these, you finally pick one place to get your pasta delivered and call the contact number listed to place your order.

In the middle of your search for the best pasta in XYZ place, you were most probably checking out what marketing professionals call GMB listings.

Google My Business or GMB lets businesses advertise their Profile and website on Google Maps and Search.

It allows businesses to connect with their prospective and existing customers, publish regular updates to their Business Profile and learn how people interact with their business in local search.

GMB plays a crucial role in a business’ local search visibility, and it helps owners put their business in front of their target audience. But with every useful tool comes a few problems.

Perhaps it slipped your mind that one of your employees had already made a GMB profile for your business earlier, or maybe you just shifted to a new location and created a new GMB profile but forgot to delete the previous one.

This will result in duplicate GMB listings. However, there are many other ways this can happen.

In this blog, we will find out how to remove or merge duplicate GMB listings.

A Quick Rundown: Why GMB Is Crucial for Your Success

GMB is a valuable tool that helps your business get discovered by its target audience in the local search.

When local consumers are searching for your business or other businesses/products/services similar to yours, you will want to be present in the search results.

Moreover, when you provide complete listings on Google My Business, you are 2x more likely to win the consumers’ trust.

Your Business Info Becomes Easily Accessible

When your business is listed, users find how, when, and where they can visit you, either via your website or physical location, get other contact details and check your hours of operation from there itself.

It is crucial to keep your business info updated, as you wouldn’t like to leave your prospects hanging around for any details they might need about your business or its offerings.

You Can Manage and Edit Your GMB Listing on the Fly in the SERPs

All you need to do is sign in to your Google account either on your desktop or mobile, search for your business, and you can then manage and edit your GMB listing as though you were in the Google My Business interface.

Thus, in case you have to close your physical store temporarily, you can edit/update this information on your Business Profile directly to let your customers know.

Similarly, when you reopen your store, you can sign in to Google My Business and inform your customers about the same. Pretty straightforward and convenient, right?

Why Is It Essential to Remove or Merge Duplicate GMB Listings?

Duplicate Google My Business listings can be troublesome.

When you have duplicate GMB listings, it is possible for Google to rank the incomplete one with zero customer reviews and ratings while discarding the listing with many reviews and all your business details.

Needless to say, this will severely impact your local SEO, and the lack of ratings and reviews on the listing might drive away many prospects as they would have nothing to rely on.

Remember that multiple GMB listings can exist for the same business in Google, but duplicate listings go against the search engine’s guidelines.

That’s the reason it is critical to fix the duplicate GMB listings issue for your business.

Think about these:

• When multiple listings are appearing on Google for a particular business, the information present could be puzzling or clashing to the potential customers.
• As stated earlier, Google might display an out-of-date or inaccurate GMB listing with incomplete business information and no reviews. This may divert the customers from your business to somewhere else.
• Moreover, speaking of customer reviews, one of your listings might have more reviews compared to the other. Now, as a customer, would you prefer to visit a business with 100+ reviews and 5-star ratings or the one with two reviews? In most cases, all other factors being the same, most people would pick the former.
• If left unresolved on GMB, duplicate business listings might potentially extend over to other sites like Yahoo, Yelp, etc., where you won’t have control over them.

Having said that, you must have now understood why it is so crucial to delete or merge duplicate GMB listings for your business. Let us now discuss how to do that.

How to Merge Duplicate GMB Listings Into One?

Let’s first begin with how you can merge two Google My Business listings into one.

1. First things first, in case both the GMB listings have been verified by Google, you will have to un-verify the listing you wish to merge. GMB can’t merge two verified business listings.
2. Make sure the address mentioned in your duplicate business listing is exactly the same as your business’s physical address.
3. In case the addresses match: Contact Google to submit your request for merging the two GMB listings. Go to Google My Business Contact Form to do this.
4. In case the addresses don’t match: Utilize the “suggest an edit” option available in Google to suggest that the incorrect address doesn’t exist. Using this feature, you can edit the location, name, hours, and much more. 

How to Remove a Duplicate GMB Listing?

If you decide not to merge the duplicate listings, you can also remove a duplicate GMB listing instead. Let’s take a look at the steps to delete a duplicate GMB profile:

1. Before deleting a duplicate listing, be sure to check that you are not deleting the verified location; otherwise, you will have to verify it once again.
2. Make sure you update the location you want to keep with any required info from the location that you are going to delete. Keep in mind that once you delete a location, you can’t recover it.
3. Log in to your Google My Business account.
4. Navigate to the “Info” tab.
5. Click on “Remove Listings,” and the GMB listing will get removed.

Wrapping It Up

Google My Business serves as a vital tool for promoting your local business.

Your Business Profile helps the customers find all your necessary information they might be looking for on the web. Therefore, it is crucial to keep all your details updated in Google My Business to get the most out of your local search presence.

Moreover, providing all the useful information in your Business Profile will help you gain your prospective and existing customers’ trust and confidence.

Now that you know how vital it is to get rid of duplicate listings for your business and the steps to merge or delete them, you are all set to go!