A little history of the development of Google Maps

Initially, Google Maps were created only for navigation. The goal was to help people find the necessary place, country, city or street. Later, Google decided to place popular geographic locations (national parks, mountains and rivers) on the map, then historical and architectural monuments.

Today, Google has gone even further and allows you to place business points on the map.

But what will happen if every company, office, firm, coffee or shawarma stand, government agency or online business is visible on the Google map at the same time?

What will our favorite service turn into?

That’s right – to the market!

Duplicate of google business profile on google maps

That is why the rules of the game were invented for entrepreneurs. (link to the rules)

But many today, not only ordinary entrepreneurs, but also SEO specialists, in pursuit of the number of clients for business, register many duplicate points on the map, not always realizing the expediency of these actions, why does this happen?

  1. A business owner with low computer literacy, creates points on the map randomly, forgetting passwords and accounts. We often see such people with questions on the Google Local Experts forum and a call to help and punish Google. Such people try to transfer their mess in work to maps, accusing everyone and everything of injustice. (Banned a point, deleted reviews, etc.)
  2. SEO specialist. The most popular metrics for measuring the quality of a specialist’s work on the Internet: the number of leads, statistics of site visits, points on the map or calls to the company. Unfortunately, 90% of such hired specialists do not have the task of developing the company’s rating. After all, they need a result here and now. So they decide to create duplicate points to improve statistics.
  3. Inexperienced users of Google maps in the Local Experts program. We remember that each participant in the Local Experts program can leave reviews, add photos to Google maps and make changes to company points on the map. The higher your level of local expert, the higher the chance to change the information or add a new company to the map. Thus, sometimes, by pure chance, duplicate points appear from people unknown to us who simply could not or did not want to find us and check, perhaps the point already exists on the map.

So, we figured out why duplicate companies appear on the map.

Now, let’s figure out whether this is good or bad. I suggest first highlighting the obvious pros and cons.

Pros:

  • More people will see my company.

This is perhaps the only, more or less real plus. Yes, this way our company can be noticed and contacted by those people who are not very attentive or do not know what they want. Those who missed our company the first time. But most often, people in the search on maps are interested in a certain geolocation (place) or parameter (price, interior) and most likely, the presence of a duplicate will not particularly affect the person’s choice.

  • I can get to the first and second pages of the search (for example, if one point is in 5th place, the second in 25th).

Again, returning to the first plus. There is a chance that inattentive people will not contact your point on the map in the first twenty, and will call you from the second. But what is the low percentage of people who will do this? If we need a result, it is usually in the first one and the number of people who reach the bottom tends to zero.

  • I can separately advertise several of my services through each point.

This is a very common phenomenon. For example, a company that repairs and sells computer equipment places 2 separate points for repair and for sale. It is good when this company has 2 separate entrances to the building, for example. or 2 separate customer service departments, then such a variation can be called justified. But when the company is called Techno PLUS, and in one office, the same people can simply either sell you a PC or accept it for repair. Most likely, such a point on the map will be processed by a moderator or one of the local experts as a duplicate and deleted.

Cons

  • My point can be deleted by moderators – this means that the extra point will simply be deleted, as well as all photos and videos and reviews. It’s good when you submit an application for merging points yourself with a request to leave customer reviews, which is possible. But what if not? Companies have contacted us with a request to help return more than 2 years of work on promotion on the Google map.
  • My company can be blocked – You should always remember that your company can be banned (blocked) for regular violation of Google rules. This means losing the ability to manage a point on the map, respond to reviews and publish any materials, news or updates. Practically depriving you of the opportunity to move in this direction.
  • Competitors can file a complaint against me – Violation of the system rules can interest your competitors. Not only for pure motives to keep the search on the map clean, but also in order to block the company on the map. On the forum of local Google experts, posts about such complaints very often appear, where they in every possible way contribute to the fact that the culprit is punished.
  • My point can be deleted by any local expert from level 5 and above – imagine that any participant of the local experts program, of which there are thousands, will file a complaint while browsing the map and accidentally stumble upon your duplicate. And you have spent so much work and time to develop this point. We ourselves repeatedly clean up the excess and do so that the maps remain a place to search for information, and not a market!
  • I need to spend more time running each point – add different photos, write materials, ask for a review for this point and respond to reviews)
  • The rating of my work at the point will be divided by 2 – one client left a review there, another there, which will divide the activity of your clients into 2 points. And the company’s rating, its popularity for each individual point will be lower, which will affect competitiveness, therefore each point separately will take much less place in the search than it could!

So, what should you do in such a situation?

What should I do if I noticed that my company has a duplicate.

Well, first of all, don’t panic. Especially if your first point on the map is under your control.

You need to submit a request to the support service, asking to merge the points. Why not delete? Well, it already depends on your desire, for example, when merging, there is an option to save reviews and transfer them to the main one.

For example, if you have negative reviews at another point, then you can simply submit a request for deletion on the part of a local expert, for the reason “Such a place is already on the map”.

Here is a short instruction

If you are not a member of the Local Experts program, or your level is not high enough for this to happen quickly. You can contact the specialized forum and ask one of the high-level experts, they will apply for you, and it will be much faster.

In the meantime, you can order from us the optimization of your point on the map, which will legally increase the number of people who find your company by searching on the Google map/

We also offer an audit of the point on the Google Map

So, on a simple graph, you can note for yourself how effectively you use the Google My Business service.