Warning: The Google Business Profile advice I got from a local SEO meetup backfired hard

A guy from a marketing meetup in Edmonton told me to stuff all my firm's service areas into the Google Business Profile description. He said it helps with ranking for specific neighborhoods like St. Albert and Sherwood Park. I did it in March and within 2 weeks Google flagged my listing for spam. I had to rewrite everything and it took 3 months to get the profile back to normal. My calls dropped by half during that time because people saw the warning notice. Has anyone else gotten bad local SEO advice that actually hurt their law firm's visibility?

3 comments

3 Comments

rubyk266d ago

The 50 times keyword thing is actually smart if you know what you're doing, not some guru trick. I saw a dog grooming place in Edmonton use 30 mentions of "near me" and their calls went UP 40% in a month because Google ranks for frequency. Your buddy probably did it wrong, like putting it in the description instead of the services section where it's hidden. Google's guidelines are just suggestions, they don't actually enforce them hard unless you're aggressive. The warning flag might have been from something else like old reviews or a bad address, not the keywords. I stuffed my own listing with 15 suburb names and never got flagged, so maybe it's about how you space them out.

william_harris6d agoMost Upvoted

Gotta disagree with you on this one lol. Google's guidelines aren't just suggestions, they've been hitting small businesses with actual suspensions for keyword stuffing lately. That plumbing guy got flagged because 50 mentions of the same thing is too much, it's not about where you put it. The Edmonton dog place might have worked short term but Google updates all the time, that kind of trick is risky. I've seen people lose listings for way less, like repeating the same service area 5 times in a row. Spacing it out across different sections is smarter but cramming 30 "near me" into anything is asking for trouble eventually.

taylorshah6d ago

My buddy runs a plumbing company in Calgary and some "guru" told him to put the same keyword 50 times in his Google My Business description. He did it and got suspended for a month lost half his leads. Took him weeks of appeals just to get back to where he started.