Transferring ownership of a listing and renaming it - what can happen?

[OrendaLtd]

Hi All,

We have a local business with multiple store fronts. We've recently bought a competitors store front, that store front has a local Google listing.

We would like to do 2 things:

1. Transfer the ownership of the listing from their accounts to ours.

2. Renaming and re-branding the listing (and of course the office)

My questions is, what can happen once we do that? Transferring the ownership is a simple task as i've seen it on Googles guidelines so is renaming it (technically speaking). Will this affect the listing itself? Rankings/Verification and anything else that may come up?

Thanks a lot for the answers!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Gal,

Google local and organic results are almost never related. Not having a local account is not something that will affect your organic listings.

In theory, once the change and verification card has come through, the change should be quick and you shouldn't notice anything disappearing. The locations are staying the same, just the business name is changing.

However, if there needs to be a change in classification, don'f forget to do this as well.

Google is pretty good at getting this right and I have never personally had any issues when changing details for clients like this.

-Andy

[irapasternack]

In theory, the listings changes you are suggesting should all work. But, Google My Business does not always work they way they say they are supposed to, especially when significant changes like this are made.

In some cases, we've made a change of a name or address for a business, and after the correct info was in place for a few days or weeks, it reverted back to the old info. One way to help avoid this is to make sure that you update all the business listings, not just Google. If Google sees the change you made being made across all directories, they are much less likely to revert anything.

As long as the listing is verified before you make any changes, you should not run into issues there. And assuming you'll be listing this business on your website, and updating all listings to point to your website, your site will benefit.