Who owns your Google My Business Page? Well, of course it should be you, the business owner. But, did you know that many times your webmaster or internet marketing firm actually owns it?
Here’s just one scenario I saw last week. We did an AdWords set up for a doctor, the AdWords account already existed. The original marketing firm had set up their own business as a location tied to the client’s Google My Business page, so it looked like the client had two business locations. The Google My Business was linked to the client’s AdWords account.
What I found out was that the search marketing firm was getting free clicks to their business at the client’s expense. $35 of clicks just in two days! All without the client’s knowledge.
It is very important that you have all items for your business set up in your name and with your email. You should be the admin and never your marketing firm. Google is very persnickety about ownership of Google My Business pages and it is very, very difficult to break a connection once established, especially if you are not the account owner.
How will this issue for the AdWords client be resolved? First, the marketing firm needs to pass ownership or give admin rights to the real business owner. The owner needs to try to separate the two business locations and if all else fails get with a consultant such as myself to call Google and try to have Google do the separation.
Separation will most likely require a site revalidation by regular mail and may or may not be successful. For this client, for the time being, clicks cannot even be stopped to the other business as there is no way to select business locations once the Google My Business Page is connected to AdWords from within the AdWords control panel.
Be aware that this is a difficult issue to resolve. If this cannot be resolved, we may have to disconnect location extensions from the client’s AdWords account which would be a huge negative in our location specific search world for this doctors ad serving.
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