Duplicate Google business profile listings of your business on the SERP will negatively affect your reputation. Such business profiles are misleading for your customers and prospects, and they may not consider your business trustworthy and credible.
Having a duplicate business listing is common these days. It is the local SEO algorithms that may result in creating a duplicate, but you need not worry. Our blog puts light on merging duplicate listings, removing them and also how to prevent the same.
Understanding Your Duplicate Listing
Before digging into the technicalities of fraudulent listing entries of your business and cleaning up duplicate business listings for local businesses, let us first understand what they are.
Duplicate GBP listings are additional business profiles on Google besides your own. Some of the factors responsible for creating a duplicate listing include:
- One of the common ones is that multiple people have added listings for your business without malicious intent.
- Also, you may have unknowingly registered your business account twice, creating a duplicate.
- Scammers sometimes create fake listings to suppress the ranking of your business and add inaccurate data on duplicate listings.
A major ranking factor in local SEO for your local business is an accurate and updated Google-My-Business profile. Therefore, businesses like yours must stay vigilant with their Google business profile and suppress duplicates.
How To Avoid Duplicate Listing?
To avoid creating a duplicate business listing, you must first track your business profile. It will help build trust and credibility for your business. Here are some of the tips, you should follow to prevent duplicate listings on search engines.
- Check Existing Listings: If you have not already created a business profile on Google or any other search engine, try searching with your business name. After the results appear, check if a profile already exists.
- Claim The Profile: If you notice a profile present already, claim it. By claiming the current listing, you prevent others from taking control over it, and prevent the creation of a duplicate.
- Update Existing Listing: After claiming the profile, you can remove inaccurate data and update your profile. Instead of creating another listing, update with appropriate information the one that is already present.
- Report Duplicate Listings: If you find that your business already has an additional listing on the search engine, removing duplicate listings is mandatory. By clicking on “suggest an edit” on the duplicate listing, report the unnecessary one.
If you find duplicates of your business profile on the search engine, either merging duplicate listings is the solution or remove duplicates by reporting them. One active listing per directory ensures robust authenticity, or else the credibility is questioned.
How Does Duplicate Listing Hurt SEO?
Duplicate business profiles on the SERP are a bad thing, and it is critical to close the duplicate listings. Now you would ask, why?
We will now discuss the impact on your local SEO efforts of a duplicate business listing.
- The Information Is Either Incorrect or Outdated: Maintaining accurate profiles on the search engine is the key to enhancing business trustworthiness. When you have more than one listing on Google, it becomes difficult to maintain accurate information on both.
Google also doesn’t allow adding the same information on two business listings. As a result, one listing will show incorrect information about your business that is misleading.
- Search Engines Gets Confused About The Right Listing: When you have duplicate listings, the search engine may not know which one is genuine and which one to show.
Worst case scenario, it may not display any of the listing when your prospects search for you. Hence, send clear signals to the search engine and maintain one listing.
- Business Reviews Split Up Into The Duplicate Listings: With more than one listing for your business, the chances are that your customers may review a listing that is not originally managed by you.
It will affect your business in the long run as the reviews that should be collected under one profile, will get collected under multiple profiles, thereby impacting SEO.
- Duplicate Listings Have Snowball Effect: Many of the business listing directories gather information from other business directories. That said, they provide information to each other.
If you have duplicate listing on any one platform, chances are that the same can get replicated across multiple directories.
Conclusion
Duplicate GBP listing is the enemy of your local SEO efforts, and therefore you should close the duplicate ones as soon as you spot them. They create serious confusion among your prospects, and your customers may also start avoiding your business because of less credibility.
Search engines do not trust a business with multiple listings for the exact location. Be attentive to such aspects to enhance the impact of your local SEO efforts and rank high on the search engine. Stay away from losing business over minor confusion.
FAQS
-
What causes duplicate listings?
There are several reasons that result in creation of duplicate listings for a business. Some of the common reasons include data aggregators, automation, manual creation of multiple listings, customers adding a business address and more.
-
How do duplicate listings affect Local SEO?
Duplicate listings have a negative effect on the local SEO efforts of a business. It causes confusion and mistrust among the customers and also search engines. Also, the ranking of your business profile starts to drop, and consumer engagement decreases too.
-
How do duplicate listings impact customer trust?
Customer trust decreases when they find duplicate business listings in the same directory. That said, they find it difficult to rely on the business credibility and often question whether the offerings are upto the mark. As a result of duplicate listings, customer loyalty gets affected too.
-
What are common signs of duplicate listings?
The common sign of navigating duplicate listings on any search engine or directory is that your rankings start deteriorating. Also, while searching for your business profile on the search engine, you find multiple listings popping up or, at times, no listing being displayed.
-
How can I identify duplicate listings?
Identifying duplicate business listings on Google or any other search engine is simple. Search with your business name on Google and look for the listings that appear. If you find more than one listing in the same name, it is a duplicate listing.
