Visibility Is No
Longer Optional

Chapter 24

They Liked Me

They liked me. They just did not think I was very good at my job.

That is the honest summary of a couple of years of my life, and I have made peace with it, mostly.

The company had roughly a hundred franchise locations. Each of them had a Google Business Profile, which is the listing that appears when somebody searches for a local business: the map pin, the hours, the phone number, the reviews. For a local service business it is not a marketing asset. It is the front door.

Profiles kept getting suspended.

Sometimes it was a content mismatch, where what Google understood about the business and what the listing said did not line up. Sometimes an office moved, legitimately, the way offices do, and the move itself triggered a suspension. Sometimes there was no discernible reason at all.

A suspended profile does not just stop bringing in customers. It removes the place where a satisfied customer would have vouched for you. Somebody finishes a job, is genuinely happy, goes to leave a review, and there is nowhere to leave it. You cannot build trust in a location that has been switched off.

And there was nobody to call.

That is the part people who have not lived it find hard to believe. There were once actual humans at Google you could reach, and by this point there were not, not for a business of that size. You submitted a form into a system and waited. Sometimes it came back reinstated with no explanation. Sometimes it came back rejected with no explanation. Some locations stayed suspended for more than seven months.

I was the expert in the room. I was the person whose job it was to solve exactly this, and I could not solve it. So I got yelled at, in meetings and outside them, by franchise owners who were losing real money while I explained again that we had submitted the appeal and were waiting.

It would be easy to write this as a story about being wronged.

They were not wrong to want results. Every one of those people had bought a business and been told marketing was handled, and from where they were sitting the marketing person was producing explanations instead of listings. If I had been them I would have been angry too, and I would probably have been less polite about it than they were.

It became one of the biggest reasons the company changed agencies. And I will tell you what happened next, because it is the only part that lets me off the hook and it took years to arrive.

The new agency could not fix it either.

This was not a small firm. It was one of the largest and best regarded agencies in franchise marketing, with resources I did not have and relationships I did not have. Locations stayed suspended for months under their watch too.

So the problem was never that I was bad at my job, although I spent a long time assuming it was. The problem was structural, and it is the point of this chapter.

We did not control the platform through which our customers were trying to verify that we were real.

Google was not the villain here. A platform that hosts business listings has to fight fraud constantly, at a scale I do not think most people appreciate, and a system that never suspends anybody would be worthless. The enforcement is going to be automated, and automated enforcement is going to be wrong sometimes, and when it is wrong about you there is no room to argue in.

There is no conspiracy in any of that. It is simply the arrangement now, and the arrangement is not going to change back.