The Rebranding of Google My Business to Google Business Profile

You, along with many others may not be aware that at the beginning of this month, Google announced that it is rebranding Google My Business as Google Business Profile. In fact, 42% of small local businesses were unaware of the changes and only 12% were very familiar or knew all about the changes.

What are the changes?

The name change isn’t a huge surprise as it’s been through multiple name changes over the years, but this time, there are also a few changes in how businesses will manage their listings on google. Let’s take a look.

Businesses will no longer be able to access and manage their single listings in the app.

They will now have to use a control panel that will appear when they enter their business name into the search engine. This panel will allow listing managers to do anything that was possible within the app, eg update business information, add photos.

This isn’t a new feature and listing managers have been able to control their listing like this for a while, but Google is now stating that all single listings should be managed this way. In fact, in 2022 the company plan to retire the app completely.

For those managing several locations, they will still have access to the app, but this will now be called Business Profile Manager.

Nothing else has been revealed yet but Google has announced they will invest more recourses into features for those with multiple listings, so keep an eye out. For now, there is the ability to do more things directly from Google Search such as:

  • Claim a business listing
  • Verify the listing
  • Send and receive messages to customers
  • Manage reviews and Q&A’s
  • Track data on inbound calls that came from Google Business Profile

How will this affect me?

The rebranding of course caused conversations within the SEO community, who were very divided and mainly left with a lot of unanswered questions.

Although these changes may be viewed negatively by some, it’s important to remember why having a Google My Business profile is so beneficial to your SEO, and this update will actually make it even easier for businesses to share the most important details whilst causing less disruption.

Blog post by Adam Burrage

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