Very often, businesses realize they have multiple pages for a location in GMB. How does this happen according to local SEO experts?

• Google: Google picks up data variants from multiple sources and in turn creates duplicate listings.
• Information Change: If a business goes through a complete rebranding, merge, move or changes phone numbers, duplicates may easily occur if the individual handling the listings effort creates a new listing instead of making edits to the existing listing.
• Spam: Spammers or competitors can duplicate a listing to hinder organic ranking.
• Lack of Awareness/Accident : You or a team member inadvertently have created a new listing instead of claiming the existing one.

Are duplicates problematic?

When you have a duplicate Google My Business listing, Google can potentially rank one listing that is incomplete with no reviews instead of your official optimized location listing. You want to avoid this kind of bad representation of your brand.

Secondly, as duplicates send mix messages to search engines, it isn’t surprising to know that duplicates will impact your SERP ranking. You want to aim for one single source of truth for search engines to crawl. You don’t want your duplicate listing outranking.

Violations- Consumers and competitors can easily flag your duplicate listing which can result in suspensions and penalties.

The Value of Removing Duplicate Google Listings

What would you be missing out on if you aren’t handling these bad weeds?

• Customer Trust
• Client Acquisition
• Brand Exposure & Food Traffic
• Full control of online presence

We are not going to lie, handling duplicates is no walk in the park. Every directory has their specifications and rules ( merging, suppressing, redirecting) in how they allow you to handle duplicates. Let the local experts guide you and take the pain away!

Want to learn more? There’s lots more to share, click here!

Sources: Search Engine Journal, Google My Business.