Most of the work that keeps your Google profile healthy takes about five minutes a week. The trick is knowing which five minutes. This week Google put a clock on one of them, so let's start there.
This week at Google
You now have four days to answer a suggested edit
Google added a line to its Business Profile help page about suggested edits. When someone suggests a change to your hours, address, phone number or category, you get notified, and you have four days to accept or reject it. If you do not respond in those four days, Google may publish the change on its own when other public information, like your own website, supports it.
Why it matters: a wrong phone number or a wrong closing time can sit live for weeks before you notice. Every one of those hours is a call you never got.
Do this: turn on Business Profile notifications on your phone, and give your profile a look every Monday morning. Four days is not long if you only check once a month.
Some owners are getting a spam review email
This one is reported, not confirmed by Google. A screenshot shared by an owner shows an email saying Google detected a spike in spam reviews on the profile, removed them, and temporarily paused new ratings, reviews and other contributions to protect it.
Why it matters: if your review count drops, or a customer tells you their review will not post, this could be why. It is not something you did wrong.
Do this: if that email lands, do not panic and do not rush out and ask twenty people at once. Keep asking one customer at a time, right after the job, the way you always should.
One lesson
Here is an idea worth stealing. A business owner had an AI tool build a simple one page website for a personal project. Then it hit him what the real use was: build a small custom page for one customer, before the meeting.
Picture what that looks like in your world. A realtor sends a buyer one page with the three homes, why each was picked, and the drive time to their office. A remodeler sends one page with the two cabinet options and the timeline. That used to take a designer a week. Now it takes a few minutes of describing what you want.
The point is not the technology. It is that a page built for one person says you paid attention, and paying attention is the thing your competitor is not doing.
This week: pick your next appointment. Ask an AI tool to build one simple page for that one person, and send it the day before. One page, one customer. See what they say.
From the blog
New today: what to do when your business has no Google reviews yet, and how to get the first ten without breaking Google's rules. Read it here.
If any of this has you stuck, hit reply and tell me what you are running into. I read every one.
Google Greg
Local Guide Marketing Academy
Idea spark: Chris Koerner on The Koerner Office.