Business Owners Need to Pay Attention to their Google Listings

Google My Business is a service that any local business relies on to formalize its online profile and expand its awareness among the search engine's users who are close to the area where the business is physically located. As the service is specifically tailored toward these kinds of companies, however, companies with much different demographic focuses and service scopes may find that their ability to draw in leads may not benefit from a profile on Google My Business at all. Some businesses may even incur harm to their overall prospects if they mistakenly use this service instead of other branches of Google's overall suite of utilities. For example, a smaller company that is not headquartered at a publicly available location because its entire business model revolves around engaging and servicing United States customers online should avoid saddling itself with a local listing on Google. One of the most common aspects that a layman would look up a business' local listing for is the business' home address, so when a business with a local listing hides its own address, the company's narrow potential customer base would interpret it to be defunct in some way. This will assuredly result in a sharp downturn in the business' relevant leads even if its own website is well-designed -- but so would taking the listing down altogether, since Google defaults to listing the business as "closed" once that happens. In this case, the business would have little choice but to personally contact Google to convince them to regard it as a "national" business while having the local listing taken down in a way that does not attach a harmful "closed" label to the business in the process. The business would be far better served if it instead gets a knowledge panel presenting information about itself to appear within SERPs generated by users searching for businesses dealing with its particular industry. Unfortunately, Google is notoriously difficult for small business owners to successfully contact and receive this type of support from, so a business might find itself "trapped" within an erroneous local listing for a while. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/atuuwk/googlemybusinessforanationalweb_based/.