This episode chronicles the ongoing Google Business Profile verification saga after consulting with SEO experts confirmed the profile serves as a critical anchor node for both traditional and AI search rankings. Home-based businesses face mounting obstacles including outdoor signage requirements, live video verification, and inconsistent reviewer standards across multiple failed attempts.
Key Takeaways:
- SEO and GEO rankings deliver 100x+ ROI on organic traffic investment Google Business Profiles function as essential authority signals; verification hassle justifies effort when organic leads comprise majority of business development.
- Permanent outdoor signage means plaques, banners, or yard signs—not printouts Google reviewers reject tape-mounted materials; vinyl banners or nailed plaques satisfy requirements and can be removed immediately post-verification.
- Turn off address visibility after verification approval Show home addresses during review to pass location requirements, then disable public display to maintain privacy for home-based operations.
The full episode details specific conversations with Google reps revealing exact requirements and explains why persistent effort pays off for traffic-dependent businesses.
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to get serious excited to be back today if you’re watching this on Video, I know especially with the high def Camera, you might notice those stitches Next to my eye. Luckily they blend mostly into eyebrow there. It just took a Bit of a hit during basketball game over the weekend. So just in a bit of Frankenstein mode at the moment
but it should heal up here shortly. Anyway, I just wanted to provide a bit of an update. I know I talked about over the past two or three weeks, I forget exactly when, the Google Business Profile kind of ongoing saga and the strategy behind that to get verified there. So I believe the last time I had just kind of remarked, hey, this is…
Important for SEO and now there’s just like a whole bunch of anti fraud protections related to getting verified on Google my business so Just a little bit more detail here And I think filling in some blanks from the last time that I talked about this. I think I was less informed about it But I mean this used to be first off super easy. Like I remember we had from one of our previous
Brands when we were still marketing out for land deals like to purchase on our own and so forth Like it was super easy. mean this was still in 2020 roughly that we had set this up because I remember getting Google reviews from buyers So and it definitely did not require like these detail video verification of office setups and everything
And for those of you who are like, yeah, what are you talking about? So, um, you know, whenever you see like a business profile, you’re on the right hand side of the screen or, you know, if you’re on mobile, kind of the first thing that shows up for a business with all various reviews and the address, what have you, um, in order to set that up now, Google requires a like full video walkthrough of, you know, the
business address. Is there anything noting on the exterior of the business to indicate the name of it? You have to be able to show at least electronic copies of EIN or you have access to a website related to the business. You need some type of physical
I don’t even know what you call it. Just stump, you know, physical, you know, paperwork or signage, of the actual business. So if that’s like a business card or something on your door to indicate the business and you have to be able to show all of this within one video. And so, we tried this three times and failed all three times for kind of different reasons. I was using Chet, you PT to try to figure this out and,
after failing, it was kind of three strikes. I don’t tell you that, but they’re like, Hey, you can’t be doing this anymore. I was not aware at the time because it’s like, you know, we’re an online business. run the business primarily out of a home office. And like, I don’t really want my home address being shown on the profile. we had Mark, Hey, there’s no address associated with this business. It’s just like focused on delivery deliveries and so forth, but it’s kind of a catch 22. Cause when you do that, Google will have.
And there’s probably mainly AI is reviewing these videos for them anyway. They were starting to flag, hey, you know, it’s not showing the address of the business, not showing the address of the business. So we’re failing from that side. In reality, people have more of a workaround where it’s like, you know, show the address that you’re at, even if it’s your home address, get verified first and then turn off.
the ability to view your address. So I didn’t know that until we probably should have checked prior. But, you know, here we are. So failed three strike policy. Then, you know, I tried to appeal it to Google and all these big corporations like they are such a black box, like non-existent customer service. I remember years ago, too, we got.
just banned suddenly from YouTube and we used to have a whole bunch of videos like internal training and so forth. It was like a huge hassle. We put so much work in, didn’t have backups and we had to go, like we had multiple appeals that were just getting buried and we had to, know, fortunately one of my partners, his family member or somebody related to his family, like had started a job at Google and they were able to work some internal digging.
to figure out that, we were just kind of like buried in the priority list and like we were blacklisted technically, but like all our appeals were just going into a black hole, but he was able to rectify that situation and get us unbanned. But it like just goes to show like sometimes you just get stuck in these holes, especially like Google meta, what had like my Facebook marketplace unmeta has been banned for well over a year. Like there’s no real way to appeal. Like it’s just blocked.
And so you can kind of get stuck within these these holes here and have to find your way around so like I you know, I was trying to Say Google. Hey, how can I still re verify and they were More adamant about like a first off online businesses You’re not even allowed to have Google business profiles, but they don’t say that prior you have to like go through a merchant center account
But I’m like, you know, we’re real estate business sometimes notaries come at like you want to find wiggle room to plus like I was talking to my SEO consultant and he’s like, you know, I know they’re paying to work with but so much of SEO and the AI search rankings like I can’t describe it technically enough because it’s not, you know, within my area of expertise. So like so much is just tied to.
like an anchor point related to your Google business profile. So like just find a way to get it through. Like you can use Yelp as another option here, but it’s just not as good for search rankings. So it’s like, okay, just keep digging, keep digging to try to figure this out. And so I was trying to finagle, okay, yeah, we’re not exactly my business. And like, okay, I appealed the decision.
And but just never heard back from Google for like two weeks. But then I tried to re verify again, and it’s just kind of hit. This has happened like a couple of times where they never updated me send any notification. It’s just like all of sudden. Yeah, I could potentially verify again. like there was no indication that I could do so until I went and tried to do it again. But now it has to go through a live video call. And so I hopped on one of those.
a bit over a week ago. And this time they didn’t even ask for the address, but they just said, Hey, where’s your like physical signage for the company? And I showed them, Hey, you know, I had just done like a printout of, you know, the serious land capital, put it on my office door effectively and had business cards. And it’s like, okay, that’s just an immediate fail. It can’t just be a printout. Which again, is just so in
inconsistent because me having that, you know, print out signage was no issue during the original verifications. It was the address piece that was failing. so like they, they say, okay, you need the signage. printed out that past the first test and now it’s another one. Nope. That that’s not good enough. So again, just goes to show the inconsistency sometimes with these larger corporations, different review mechanisms. And I was like, yeah.
Yeah, okay. Can I just like fix this during the call? He’s like, no, no, no, we can’t do that. But here’s and it’s like, okay, can you just tell me very clearly what is needed for us to pass this part of verification? I’m sure they get answers like this all the time and like edge cases like ours. I mean, there’s so many companies out there that are just run out of a home office. So they must get this question a lot. It’s like, okay, it needs to be something, you know, like permanent signage, um, uh, like a, uh,
You know, some type of physical, keep saying physical, but almost like an engraved sign that needs to go into the door. then you’re like glued or nailed on what have you, like something that can’t just be taped on necessarily. Or you need some type of banner or it could be on the wall. Potentially. You could have it on the exterior of the building. Like again, some type of banner, you could have a yard sign.
So that kind of triggered my mind. Like that seems pretty simple to do and probably pretty cost effective. So I made sure to grab all those examples, transcript, et cetera. So was like, okay, I went back to our ops manager. It’s like, okay, can you figure out, well, actually I went back to Chetuby T like, hey, give me some examples of these physical signage, what we can do with the permanent things that Google requires. And they suggested, yeah, like vinyl banner, et cetera.
that seemed a little harder to put up. and I still wasn’t sure Google was going to accept that. So I’m like, okay, just prep us a physical sign. I put together in the yard really quick and then, you know, take it down after we’re done. living in like a suburb part of, Austin. but, you know, the Google employee had indicated, yes, that would work. So we got our ops manager to order up.
A logo with a number of the address, et cetera, for yard sign. And that had just come in. So I’m about to test that now, and get that done. But I just wanted to update you all as far as like this back and forth where we failed this four times now. but just have to keep going back to the well because like if we pass this, it’s just very beneficial again for SEO and AI search rankings. Anything you can do to drive further traffic, right? Like it’s worth going through the hassle.
in like today’s new economy where so much is tied for that, especially AI search rankings. And then for a land funding partner site, I will probably just use a similar setup, but at my parents’ house in Austin instead. it’s not, like I’d rather get the serious land capital one set up first. I’ll probably eventually want to do land price or two, which is going to be a different trick, but I could probably work with.
our CTO on the team to do that one in instead here. Like you just got to play some of these games to pass the review sometimes and then just take down the address and just move on with your business. Now that you’ve kind of passed it, it’s not like, you know, Google’s going to be routinely auditing these things later on, but you you have to pass that first test. So just wanted to update you all as far as like.
Again, the rationale why we’re putting so much effort into this because, you know, SEO and organic traffic is, um, the majority of leads that we get nowadays. Um, and the ROI that we’ve gotten on it compared to the money spent is just like, it’s tremendous. It’s like, you know, a hundred acts in terms of deals that it’s brought us, uh, maybe even more than that. Um, from a ROAS perspective, um,
So to continue to double down in an area that’s worked better for us than anything just makes sense to deal with the hassle. So I will let you know once we sort more of that out, but wanted to provide some more input and some workarounds to get through the black box that are these massive corporations. So with that in mind, SeriousLand.Capital for any of your funding needs.
Again, 50K purchase price minimum, Land Daily Diligence Facebook group just reviewed some deals there. Some really interesting ones today, actually. It’s one in South Carolina. It’s quite difficult. And then LandPricer.ai, again, most reliable land pricing tool in the market. A few more bug fixes and I think we will be live to test a whole bunch more properties on the next Facebook review and others. So looking forward to that. Subscribe and share everybody. Enjoy this one. Take care. Bye.
