Anyone, including your competitors, can make suggestions to edit your Google My Business listing. Over the last year there has been an increase in spammers updating Google My Business listings. Therefore it is important to know how these updates and edits (visible by the orange text) are taking place and how to counteract them. Not showing the correct information will send your leads elsewhere. More information about how you will receive an alert from Google about these changes? Check below!

To help counter this problem Google sent an email out to account owners, ensuring them that all changes made to a listing will be sent directly to the account holder's email. However, this is a fairly recent move and has only been implemented since late 2017 and to this date the actions that Google take to notify you are questionable. But first we need to explain how someone can modify your business listing.

To understand this situation better, it's best to take a step back and look at the basics. When you are filling in your GMB profile, you'll be asked various questions that provide valuable data. This data makes it easier for potential customers to find and get in touch with your company. If for one reason or another, you don't complete the information, anybody else can. In fact, anybody can make suggestions that will change your business-critical details, including your competitors!

All this person has to do is click on your business listing and find the "Suggest an edit" option. This feature gives anyone the right to make some important changes to your listing. As you can see on the pop-up window some of the changes include your company's name, address, hours, phone, website and category. 

Whenever someone edits your business listing that person will receive the following information about his/her edits.
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According to Google, account administrators get an email notification in case of an edit suggestion. However, many people receive these emails after Google sets them live. By regularly checking your GMB dashboard you will be sure not to miss out of any updates. The edits will show up in the dashboard as "Updates from Google". 

However we need to make a little sidenote on this entire process. After testing on our own business listing it is still unclear after how many edits exactly you get notified. This doesn't mean that Google won't send out any alerts or mails for these edits but it is still fuzzy when exactly they will notify you about these edits.

Since there is no way of stopping people from editing your business listing, you need to edit the listing manually to revert it. This means whenever you notice an alert from Google or a change in your business information you need to take action and revert it. The moral of this entire article is that you need to be proactive, since your customers rely on their mobile devices to find your local business. It is crucial to ensure your listing is accurate and up-to-date to attract traffic.