Marketing Monday: How To Delete Your GMB or Google My Business (And Bring It Back)
Originally Published November 2020
For some reason, you need your Google My Business to disappear from Google Search and Google Maps. Google offers a few options inside GMB, such as “Remove” “Temporarily Closed” and “Permanently Closed”, but you’ll find those don’t quite remove you completely from results.
After watching today’s video, you’ll learn how to scour your Google My Business from Search and Maps much better than even Google can tell you, and, I’ll even show you how to recover it if you change your mind in the future.
Let’s learn how to delete your Google My Business (and bring it back), together.
Also, be sure to check out our video on “How To Delete Your Google My Business (And Bring It Back)” if you prefer to watch rather than read.
Disclaimer
When making lots of edits to a Google My Business, it can result in a suspension by Google My Business. This means your GMB disappears form Search and Map completely until you fix or appeal the suspension. Maybe this is exactly what you wanted anyway! If not, I’ll go over how to defeat a suspension later in the video too.
1. How To Delete Your Google My Business Completely
Whether it’s for compliance reasons, like healthcare or financial, or if you just want to burn everything related to your business to the ground, sometimes you just want to delete your GMB completely. I’m here for you.
- First step, login to business.google.com.
- Select your GMB listing.
- On the left-hand menu, choose Info.
- Delete lots of info:
- Delete your Address
- all but one Category
- all Service Areas
- and on down the list EXCEPT for your phone number. You’ll need to keep one piece of contact info intact.
- On the right-hand side, choose “Mark as Permanently Closed”.
- Wait 5-10 minutes.
- Google your business name, and voila! No appearance for GMB in Google Search, no map pin in Google Maps.
CAUTION: If you NEVER want to bring this listing back to life, you can also choose on the right-hand side, “Remove Listing”. This removes it from your GMB account and control. If you do want to bring your listing back to life, read on.
Why did that work?
- If you just “Remove Listing”, everything stays the same in Search and Maps, you just don’t have any control over it. Not ideal.
- If you just list it as “Temporarily Closed”, people still see the listing just the same in Search and Maps, it just gets the “Temporarily Closed” text on it.
- If you just list it as “Permanently Closed”, people can still occasionally find your business by searching the right terms, though it is harder.
Instead, we deleted tons of information first, reducing the chances of it ever showing up in search to NIL, in combination with Permanently Closing it.
2. How To Bring Your GMB Back From The Dead
CAUTION: This won’t work if you selected “Remove Listing”, since you no longer control the listing. You’d have to start over completely by reclaiming the GMB listing, in the normal process of getting a postcard in the mail.
- First step, login to business.google.com.
- Select your GMB listing.
- On the left-hand menu, choose Info.
- Replace all of the info you previously deleted.
- On the right-hand side, choose “Mark as Open”.
This is where the process can deviate.
Google may allow your GMB to open normally, and everything will be hunky-dory. You’re done!
Or, Google may suspend your account for suspicious activity, which means it still won’t show up in Search or Maps.
Let’s go over how to defeat that suspension.
3. How To Reinstate Your Suspended GMB
First step, login to business.google.com.
Select your GMB listing.
Make sure there’s nothing illegal, immoral, or false about your GMB listing. If there is, fix it.
In a separate tab, head to Google My Business’ suspension support page. Follow the directions. Generally speaking, do the following:
- Select “no” as you haven’t submitted a reinstatement request before.
- Select “yes” you are a representative of the company.
- Select “yes” you read the GMB guidelines and are in compliance.
- Select “yes” your business is at the listed address.
- Select “yes” you have accurate address listed.
- Select the answer that applies to you about your service area.
- Select the answer that applies to you about face-to-face business.
- Select “no” that you don’t have multiple profiles at the same location.
- Add the information they ask for:
- your name
- the email should be the email you use to manage the profile
- business name (just as it is on the GMB)
- address or service area (just as it is on the GMB)
- URL for GMB (get this from the other tab we had open, it’s in the address bar)
- phone number to reach you at
- additional info (i.e. why you closed the listing, when, and why you’re opening it again and when, and when the suspension occurred)
- if you have photos of the business from the street, parking lot, interior, etc., include those as attachments to show you’re a real business.
- Click Submit
If you don’t have those photos to submit, don’t worry. You may be asked for them later though, so it’s a good idea to go get them.
Usually, Google will email you within 1-3 days letting you know if your GMB is reinstated, or if they need more information like photos of the business.
Disclaimer
One final disclaimer – if you get suspended more than one or two times, Google may start to flag any other GMBs that are part of your account as well, or could suspend your whole account. So don’t just do the above process for fun any old time. Use it wisely.
Marketing Monday: How To Delete Your Google My Business (And Bring It Back)
I hope this video on how to delete your Google My Business (GMB) and bring it back helps you out as you market your company.
Check out our other Marketing Monday videos in our YouTube playlist to help you learn how to develop your website and handle digital marketing for your company.
Cohlab
Cohlab