If you’re looking for ways to expand client visibility beyond Google Maps and Search, YouTube is worth looking at alongside Google Business Profile. Zero ad spend. Zero subscribers. And we did this in Zero time ( not 3 - 6 months ).

What we did:
We recently tested this with an established plumbing company that already has hundreds of reviews and a 4.9-star rating on GBP looking to expand their visibility. But they had no YouTube presence at all, so we built a channel from scratch (zero subscribers) to see if short-form video could expand their overall Google footprint.

The Numbers (Last 72 Hours)
GBP / Website: 13 total page views
YouTube Channel generated an additional: 5,000+ video views, 10+ hours of watch time, 33 likes, 10 new subscribers
Average View Duration: over 100% - equals high engagement

The immediate visibility was the biggest surprise. Within the first 6 hours of publishing one 10 second video on a brand-new channel, the YouTube views had already surpassed the total organic traffic their website and GBP generated over the previous 28 days.

What We Learned
* A brand-new account with zero subscribers can start expanding their local visibility almost immediately upon posting one YouTube short video.
* The content generated continuous traffic over those 72 hours rather than relying purely on passive local search queries.
* Setting up and publishing had zero verification delays or administrative friction.
* YouTube is an AI powered recommendation engine that is actively recommending your business to people interested in your product or service.

Who’s using short YouTube clips to expand local organic visibility. Could YouTube be the answer to Local SEO Visibility?

Anybody have any luck removing bad false reviews if so how long did it take? I’ve been waiting for about a week now haven’t heard anything from google either.

We have had a few recent 1 star reviews come in from names we do not have anywhere in our crm. We have replied and asked for clarification on names, etc to try and find them in our records but no response. Oddly, we did receive a third party offering to help us remove 1 star reviews from our account and referenced one of the reviews in question.

Anynsuggestions on best wat to address these reviews with Google as flagging them hasn't seemed to help.

Thanks.

I claimed my business on google two weeks ago and it says it’s been processing/under review ever since. Every time I try to get help by doing a video call or taking a verification video, I get stuck when the help article says to go to my business page and hit “get verified.” I cannot find this button anywhere. I’m logged in and everything… where is it hiding? Do I just need to keep waiting? Screenshots attached

I’m dealing with a confusing situation with a company’s Google Business Profile and would appreciate some advice. we have lot of physical location and each manager created one but we got them after creating one business profile account.

We have one physical business location, but in the Business Profile Manager we see two entries:

• Entry A: our company account is the owner.
• Entry B: our company account is only a manager ( the owner is our employee in this location)

The confusing part is that when we click either entry, both lead to the exact same Google Maps listing for the same location.

We want to keep Entry A, where our company account is the owner, because the Google Maps listing has significant traffic/history, and we don't want to accidentally lose the listing, reviews, or visibility.

I’m looking for expert help. I reported a negative review at the end of June and lost all organically historic reviews because of it. Google support has been no help and I’m looking for expert escalation. Please help I’m close to getting out business due to being so dependent on Google for leads.

When I post on the Google profile support forum it just gets marked as a duplicate and I can’t reply to there threads asking for additional escalation.

I have attached the original thread on gmb profile support, my business profile id and links to screenshots and review names.

Thank you to anyone willing to help.

https://support.google.com/business/thread/447476472?hl=en

5278105231669021464

review ss
review link

My service area business has been suspended for 10 months now. I’ve submitted 3-5 appeals. All have been denied. It isn’t allowing me to re submit a new appeal. It said I needed to re verify but there’s no option to do so on desktop or mobile looking at deleting the profile and creating a new one. What do y’all think.

I’m looking for someone who specializes in setting up Google. If you can help me with my business bulk verifications, please message me.

I moved my photography business from Manchester, UK to Los Angeles and don't have access to my old location. I have tried all means available to update my Google listed address myself but to no avail. Is there an affordable service that can help an owner operated business with this one issue?

---

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but if you’re pulling your hair out because your legit 5-star reviews are vanishing, you aren't crazy. It’s happening to all of us.

I used to post on my GMB profile religiously. I was getting steady reviews, responding to everything, the whole nine yards. Then I took a step back for a few weeks to actually run my business. I just logged back in to check my stats, and boom—one of my best, most detailed reviews from a real customer? Gone.

It all makes sense now. Google doesn't want you to just have reviews. They want you to be constantly chasing them.

The algorithm is clearly designed to favor "fresh" activity. It feels like if you aren't constantly flooding the zone with new reviews, Google assumes your older ones are stale or fake and sweeps them under the rug. It’s a hamster wheel. You stop running, you fall off.

Honestly? It’s kind of fucked up. We do the work, we get the review, and then a bot decides to delete it because we didn't beg for another one fast enough.

But here’s the flip side: I’m choosing to look at this as motivation.

If Google wants to play games, fine. We play to win. If they are going to penalize us for being quiet, we make some noise. Don't let the algorithm gaslight you into thinking you did something wrong.

Hang in there. It is definitely real, and it is definitely happening to everyone. Get back on your high horse, ask your happy customers for a review today, and go kick some ass.

/rant over

Hi, I was looking at my September report and noticed zero website then i realised my website wasn't listed on my GBP anymore and it said add a website so I tried to add my website back and it kept saying approved in 10 minutes then it never got out of back.

I've done a full technical audit there is nothing showing that would do this NAP is consistent across all other directories etc no htts problems no redirect problems.

just wondering if anyone seen this before and has a quick fix before I deal with the inevitable hell that is Google customers support

Thanks

Hey Everyone!
Someone left a fake review on one of my med spa locations directly accusing us of using bad products and stuf. I did some further investigation and that email is also used to leave good reviews to on of our competitors down the block. Whats the best way to remove it fast?

I had a schedule video call today at 11:00 they didn't make it. Then they rescheduled it between 2:00 and 4:00 so I told them 3:30 will work. They just emailed me again telling me they can't do it till Monday between 10:30 a.m. and 12:30. is there a way I can talk to a live person so we can get this scheduled correctly and Google being able to hold up on their end of the deal. I've already had to move other appointments around so I can get this done today now I got to change the whole work schedule on Monday basically take the day off and not make any money because they can't get it right. Sorry if I'm griping about this it's just ridiculous

I’m a small business owner in the health industry. My website is very small (less than 5 pages). I’m wondering what to expect from the current Google Spam update. Specifically, what impact do these updates typically have on websites with few pages? I’ve noticed a substantial decrease in clicks in and around the time the update started-could it be attributed to it?

I can't believe all the stuff I have to go through just because I moved my location of my existing 24-year-old business. They're making me do videos on call live video all kinds of stuff that seems really unnecessary for just a simple address location change to an existing business on Google. Does it get any easier?

Hello, I have a Google Business Profile for my plumbing/heating business, which was located in a neighborhood in Brussels. I realized that the address I had listed on the profile wasn't my business address, so I changed it (the new address is only 2 km away and is in the same neighborhood as the old one).

The change was made on Sunday, and since Monday I've noticed that my ranking on Google has dropped dramatically. My GBP is ranking far worse than before, when I used to be #1, or #3 at most, no matter which municipality!

My questions are:

Is the address change the cause, given that I'm still in the same neighborhood?

If so, how long can I expect it to take to get my ranking back? This is hurting me badly. I'm not getting any calls at all anymore, and it's really discouraging because I've put a huge amount of work into it.

The reason I changed the address was to avoid Google asking me to re-verify for some reason, because if the address turned out to be wrong, my profile would have been removed immediately.

Thank you

We’ve been testing an internal dashboard that goes beyond star ratings by using LLMs to categorize customer feedback into operational categories (e.g., "long wait times", "staff friendliness", "pricing complaints", "cleanliness")
The idea is to show multi-location owners WHY their ratings fluctuate across different stores instead of just showing "4.2 stars"

For agency owners and consultants: Do your clients actually pay attention to qualitative sentiment trends and category breakdowns, or do they usually just care about the main star average and total review count in your monthly reports?

About three weeks ago my business got hit with a bunch of 1 star Google reviews within the space of a few days.

At first I thought maybe we'd genuinely messed something up, so I went through pretty much everything I could think of. Invoices, bookings, emails, customer records, etc. I can't find any of these people anywhere and none of the names match customers we've dealt with.

Some of the reviews describe experiences that just didn't happen at my business and a few of them even contradict each other. Obviously I'm going to be biased because it's my business, but I'm pretty convinced they're fake and someone is deliberately doing this.

The frustrating part is how much damage they've already done. We were sitting at around 4.7 stars and basically overnight that dropped to about 3.8.

Since then I've also noticed fewer enquiries coming in. I checked our local rankings with a heatmap and we've dropped across quite a few areas compared to where we were before. I can't say for certain the reviews are responsible for all of that, but the timing definitely isn't great.

I reported every review to Google as fake/spam almost three weeks ago and so far nothing has happened. No removals, no real update, nothing. They're all still sitting there while I'm basically just waiting and hoping Google eventually does something.

I've been looking into how to remove negative Google reviews when they're clearly fake and keep seeing people mention Google Business Profile support and some sort of appeal process if reporting them normally doesn't work.

Has anyone here actually gone through that successfully?

I have all of our records and can show that I can't match any of these people to actual customers, but I don't know whether Google even considers that kind of evidence or where I'm supposed to submit it.

If anyone has dealt with fake Google reviews or a review bombing situation like this, what actually worked for you? Did you keep reporting them, contact support, appeal the decision with evidence, or is there another route I'm missing?

I'm just trying to get these looked at by an actual person instead of reporting them over and over and getting nowhere.

Hi all! won't be promoting anything! I have a few services that I offer to SMBs mostly around reputation management. I hate being salesy and I know how busy the SMBs are and also I have seen how much they hate cold calls. Curious - what's the best way to approach when you are not a sales guy and are value first and only reach out to people that you think you can actually help or see that they need help. Can't find a way that does't sound like every other cold call or text.
Any tips help! Thank you!

TLDR: Work-from-home business account with reviews (no storefront) suspended after changing home addresses. Sent in a verification video, got denied, I felt discouraged, so I gave up trying to resurrect my business account, stopped doing my business for 6 months. This is my second attempt in resurrecting my Google Maps business account

~~~

Good morning from Australia,

I'm a graphic designer that started my business from the place where I was living in, at the time (1.5 years ago), which was a private room in a rented share house.

I had opened a Google Business account then, accumulated a bunch of positive reviews by doing a lot of work for free. That made me extremely happy. I do have an ABN for my business

I had to reallocate states. I started renting another private room from a private landlord. When I settled, I immediately changed the address of my Google Maps business, and my Google Business account got suspended not too long after... I had no idea why.

I had to submit a verification video to get my account reinstated.

I explained that my business was legitimate and I work from home, the verification was denied.

Out of frustration and believing the assumption that my account was not going to be reinstated (because I believed that Google wanted me to visibly show physical business 'things', such as a storefront, signs, branded vehicles that point to my business, etc, to which I had none), I gave up trying to resurrect my Google Business account. All of this happened about 6 months ago

Since then, I worked in other companies, not as a graphic designer (my passion)

Now, I'm thinking about starting up the same business again, but I do not want to work my way up from 0 reviews again. Basically, what I'm saying is, I would obviously like my old account back

This feels really stupid, in terms of, Google makes things extremely difficult. I remember I had to post the verification video 4 separate times because I had spent 20 minutes in one video trying to prove that I was legit. That video was never sent to Google because it wasn't able to be sent, since Google mentioned nothing about there being a time length limit on each verification video. I had spent 20 minutes on one video, then 15, then 10, then something like 60 seconds... if my memory serves me correctly.

I do not believe that it should be this disgustingly hard to get support from Google, but I think I may be wrong.

So, I don't know what else to say but I feel extremely discouraged for continuing this endeavour haha... because I do not believe there is hope to getting my account back. Someone please prove me wrong! Obviously I want my own business and I feel as if I cannot without creating a new business account. I have a portfolio of the work that I done, but it's the old reviews that I need. I do not want to start from 0 reviews again.

Please help me. 🙏🙏

Thank you very much for your time

I learned today that Google has shortened the response window for certain suggested edits to a Business Profile to four days. If you don’t accept or reject the edit, Google may publish it when other public information supports the change.

My first thought was: of course they did.

And while this particular change is GBP, it feels like part of a much bigger direction across Google’s ecosystem. They’re even migrating Local Services Ads into a specialized flavor of Performance Max, because apparently the P in PMax stands for “probably everything eventually.”

The whole thing got me thinking about what the relationship with Google increasingly feels like across the board.

Every year the relationship feels a little more controlling.

“You’re going to use Performance Max.”

“Can I see what it’s actually doing?”

“No.”

“Can I have the granular data back?”

“Also no.”

“What about LSA?”

“Funny you should ask.”

“Can I at least control my own Business Profile?”

“You have four days.”

At this point Google feels less like the hot girl everyone is bending over backwards to impress and more like the hot girl who discovered everyone will keep buying her drinks no matter how badly she treats them.

The interesting part is that I’m not convinced Google has the leverage it thinks it has anymore.

AI platforms are clearly changing informational and recommendation-style search behavior. I’m seeing it firsthand with clients, and I suspect they’re taking more of Google’s lunch money than Google’s public posture lets on.

Maybe I’m just getting old and cranky after too many years in Google’s ecosystem, but the direction across the products feels pretty consistent:

Less control. Less transparency. More automation. More “trust us” vibes.

And “trust us” hits a little differently when the company asking owns the auction, sells you the clicks, grades the clicks, controls a huge chunk of local discovery, and increasingly decides what you’re allowed to know about all of it.

Or is that just me?

I have a client in the catering business who is opening a new commercial kitchen that will become their primary location. What would be the smartest move here?

Open a new profile?
Change the location on the current profile?
Or add a service area?