99% of the time it was suspended because a competing marketing company reported it from 7 or more different accounts.
They may report it as a duplicate, or they may report it if your business listing is named something other than your legal business name, a strategy Google never gave any attention to, until about 3 weeks ago.
Why do marketing agencies do such atrocious things?
For money. They realize you are outperforming their clients and figure if they can throw a stumbling block your way, they may have an advantage. These snakes also like to pop up as the hero offering to “help” you with the suspension and pit you against your current marketing agency.
The good news:
Once you file the appeal, update the listing to reflect the official business name, or address or whatever accusation is being made, it will be reinstated.
In the meantime, the listing is still live and rankings not impacted. If you’re in situation where your business name doesn’t have keywords in it, you can consider doing a DBA (doing business as) and then getting some official documents in the name of the DBA and you’ll have an even stronger advantage once we re-optimize with the official keyword heavy name. Why? Because other people are going to get hit with this too and very few will go to the extent to get a DBA which means keyword heavy business names will perform EVEN BETTER as Google continues to roll out this new verification mandate.
It seems like bad news at a glance, but under every obstacle is an opportunity.
Next steps:
- Update business name to reflect legal name
- Appeal the suspension with documentation of the name, explain you often do business under this name. But be willing to change the listing name to match your official business name.
- I recommend going forward with a keyword heavy DBA, change a utility bill to this name. (For example “Grace Dental of City Name” as a DBA for “Grace Dental”
- Once we have the official name as a keyword heavy name we can update the listing to reflect it again, thus enhancing SEO even further.
- The owner of the listing has to do this. If you are the owner of the listing, you will need to initiate the appeal. If we have ownership of your listing, our team will ask you for documentation to get the listing approved by Google.
I’m sorry you’re encountering this obstacle and our team will assist you in any way possible to get this resolved for you.