Hi, I’m Justin, the founder and CEO of Merchynt. I wanted to take the time to write this letter about how suspensions work and how we help in the event of one, to give you more context around it all based on our experience of working with thousands of business owners over the past 6+ years, being an approved Google developer, having industry-low suspensions rates, and near perfect reinstatment records.
Please don't worry if your GBP was suspended; we will help you get through it. Please read this entirely and follow the steps outlined to get help from our team of GBP suspension experts.
Our goal at Merchynt is to do good things with good people and help local business owners thrive. To do that, we need to take extreme caution to never do something that could harm a business. One way that we ensure this is by limiting Paige's features to not allow it to edit any settings on your Google Business Profile that can cause suspensions or reverifications.
These risky settings, which we don't change, include:
Your Business Name
Your Business Address
Your Phone Number
Your Website URL
Your Business Categories
Your Business Hours
If you wanted to change any of these settings, you'd need to do them directly inside Google. While Google does give us the ability to change these settings as an approved development partner, I made the tough decision to not enable our users to change any of these settings from inside Paige out of extreme caution since changing any of these often leads to a suspension. It's also our support team's policy to never advise a customer to change any of these settings in Google without first warning them that a suspension may occur.
A huge common misconception out there is that publishing posts against Google’s best practices can lead to a suspension, but actually, if you publish content that Google doesn't like (such as inappropriate images, profanity, promoting illicit or regulated products, or including phone numbers in text or images), Google will simply take down that post and disable your posting ability for a short period of time, and will notify you about it. You will not get your Google Business Profile suspended for posting content against Google’s terms. Below is an example email you would receive if you or Paige published a post against Google's content policy:
Aside from changing sensitive settings as mentioned above, there are some other common reasons your Google Business Profile may get suspended. In order of how often we see them:
Customers cannot or usually would not visit you at the address you previously got verified by Google, and now that Google is more strict with addresses (particularly with service businesses) their quality assurance algorithm finally caught you.
You have a duplicate profile, or one that is similar enough to have triggered a review.
A competitor flagged your business with Google to get an unfair advantage. This is an unfortunate but common thing marketing agencies will do to give their clients a leg up. If your business profile's name includes a keyword (or many), this is more likely to have happened since Google is now more strict with keyword stuffing business names than previously.
You created your Google Business Profile or got it verified / reverified within the past 7 days. Oftentimes, Google gives a conditional verification when you initially verify a GBP, but then later does further checks and may suspend it if you didn't pass the more in-depth checks. This typically happens within 3 days, but can take a little longer sometimes.
You’re unlucky. Google’s algorithm will flag ~2% of Google Business Profiles annually as part of their way of ensuring the right owners have access to their business profiles and that their information for your business is accurate.
Don’t just take this from me, though. Below is what Google’s AI says about this topic when asked:
So, back to our mission of trying to do good things with good people, and helping business owners thrive, just because Paige could not have gotten your Google Business Profile suspended, we'd still like to help you get through this stressful time to the best of our abilities. To do this, we'll need you to email support@merchynt.com from the email address that you log into Paige with the following details below:
(Note: If you'd prefer to handle yourself, we wrote a detailed guide about that which you can read and follow along to with here.)
Your exact business name (as it appears on your Google Business Profile)
The type of business that was suspended
How long ago (roughly) you last verified your Google Business Profile
Which of the reasons above do you think resulted in your suspension? Please provide as much detail as possible so we can be helpful quickly. The more information you give us, the faster we can help.
If you had an address previously verified on your Google Business Profile, and if that address is your home, a virtual office, or a P.O. box.
Whether you've already submitted an appeal with Google (You'd do that here), and if so, how long ago, and was it already denied?
If your appeal was already denied, did you try to appeal that denial already? (You'd do that here)
Once you provide us with this information, our team of experts will investigate and let you know what next step we think makes the most sense for you. We will offer this 100% free of charge. If you want to try doing this yourself, please be sure to provide Google as much information as possible, and speak very politely to them. We find that simply providing Google exactly what they ask for during the approval process and speaking to them nicely gets GBPs verified again the first try, and within 3 business days on average.
We hope your Google Business Profile never gets suspended, but as anyone who has been in this industry for years knows, at some point it likely will, and we'll be there to help when it does.
Thank you for your support as we continue to grow our businesses together.
Very best,
Justin Silverman
Founder & CEO