A2O Digital meets with our experts Ashley and Julie, to dig deeper into the Google Business Profile product, and how it's specifically affecting the home service industry. GBP is rolling out an important change to the US, which will impact suspended listings and the reinstatement process. Listen to our episode to hear what you can do to prepare for the new rollout.
Tim 00:19
Hello, my name is Tim Coleman and I am your host. I am also the managing partner A2O Digital a full service digital marketing agency working exclusively with home service businesses. Our guests today are Ashley ventricle and Julie Campbell, both members of the A2O digital team. Ashley has been working in digital marketing since 2008. And Julie since 2015. Both have spent a significant amount of time working with Google and its products, Ashley and Julie, welcome. As usual, there's a lot changing at Google right now today, we're going to discuss the big changes that are coming to Google Business Profile, you know, often referred to as GBP. A lot of business owners might call this part of the page like either maps or local, my guest today have been working with businesses as they are experiencing some of the changes that are already occurring, and are currently working to prepare for a big change coming for suspended listings, that once they get suspended, they need to get reinstated. And that's kind of a process in its own. Let's talk through the various scenarios we've been running into with new listings existing listings and what we expect to see coming kind of to a theater near us soon. So let's kind of start what has been your experience recently, with new Google My Business listings that are that we're creating from scratch a new listing, let's let's start the conversation with new listings.
Julie 02:00
Sure, in the past couple of months prior in the past used to be a postcard verification. So Google would mail a postcard to the to location, once location received the postcard it had a code on it, you would go back to the profile put in the code and your in your listing was live a few months back, they changed that process, Google changed that process to a video verification. So business owners actually have to go to their location and record a video at their location, upload it to Google, that then gets processed and approved by Google in order for the local listing to go live. Now, with any new process, there's often challenges.
Tim 02:41
So let me interrupt here, Julie. So here's the end of the famous postcard. It's over?
Julie 02:48
You know we work with home service businesses, so I'm not positive that that's definitely the case 100% for every business category out there for as far as home services and industry that we work with 100% video verification.
Tim 03:03
Okay, so the industry is home services we've been working with, it's that somebody should play tops for the postcard or something. I don't know. Like, that's an end of an era.
Julie 03:13
Yeah, I mean, I think they're trying to get crack down on spam. And this just makes it a little bit more challenging for people to spoof and fake by having it, yeah, it totally makes sense. But with any new process, it's often riddled with bugs. And this, of course, was no different. We had, there's been a bunch of issues with people going to upload the video, you don't do it live with a Google rep or anything like that, you actually, you press a button, record it and then press it to upload it into the profile. And it's we've had issues run into issues where the video won't upload properly. And then once it is uploaded, it would go into a processing phase and kind of be stuck in this processing phase and then revert back and make you start all over again, then you'd go to do it a second time and it gets stuck in processing again, and in some cases been stuck in the processing phase for days. And then the business owners wondering, do I need to make this recording again, or where are we with this process. So it's been a buggy process. It's a frustrating process for busy, very busy business owners that have to do this multiple times. Recently, some product experts have been posting that a lot of these video bugs have been fixed. So there's been acknowledgment that it has been
