Google+ & Google Places for Business

It seems that google totally messed up their Google+ local pages and Google places for business.
I had a google place for business page that I just wanted to change the address of and then the nightmare began. First of all google told me that the address cannot be changed and that I need to create a new listing. I insisted on keeping the local listing because of the reviews and it turned out that I can keep the listing and change the address. Then it was all well but then they disabled my listing and I called them again. They explained that google business for local will be merged with Google+ local pages and that I can now manage my listing from google+. It sounded good but the local listing stopped appearing from searches unless my search was very specific. I then request a new pin for the google places for business listing and I got it and reactivated my page and it is now slowly picking up.
It appears that nobody at google has any clue at what is actually going on with their services and how to handle them correctly. At some point one google support specialist even told me "I don't know what happened to your listing but it is something I have never seen before and don't know how to handle it". Be aware! If you have a working google places for business listing - don't touch it ever! That's my sincere advice.

Forgot to mention - after all this happened I lost about 50% of my revenue, which apparently was previously generated by google and now I'm pretty much down to organic web site traffic.

If you lost 50% of your revenue because you ranking tanked, sir, you are doing it wrong.

Support is usually pretty spot on, so I am surprised to hear you've had trouble. I would agree that in the past when I have called them with real tricky situations, I had to pretty much guide them through everything. Address changes are killer. Often you don't know which way they are going to go, add the merge into the mix, and you got a mess.

I agree with your approach personally. I haven't re read it, but I seem to recall this thread might have some things that are relevant to your situation. Check it out: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/local-search/16169-address-change-without-changing-phone-number.html

Why am I doing it wrong if I lost 50% of the revenue? It simply means that 50% of the customers were coming through google, I don't see anything wrong with that?

You don't think it is wrong to depend on Google for 50% of the business you bring in? To depend on a single, notoriously unpredictable source for 50% of your income? Well, if that is the case, perhaps I am pointing out the wrong problem...

Of course it is wrong, but well, I did not want it to happen that way and I wasn't aware that I was so dependant on google. Now I'm diversifying my source of customers
With a brick and mortar business you unable to identify where your customers are coming from me. Even if you question them somehow, usually they would say internet, which could mean google, another web site, my own web site, etc., so it doesn't give a very good picture.

Start thinking about traffic via Q&A sites, Reddit style sites, relevant forums, LinkedIn groups can be great for some bizs. Once you start driving said traffic, lets no forget to retarget them. Been recently playing with retargeting more, and have had a lot of success so far.

Hey soreman, whatever happened with your listing? Did they fix it?

This is very interesteiong

This is very interesting, Google do mass changes,without any information.

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