Hi,

Saw a guy tweet about his frustrations with Google. Apparently he had to send in his verification video three separate times because Google kept finding small mistakes.

I get it. That can be annoying. Took me two times for my own company and I do this for a living.

But then he followed up with:

"It's just so weird to me that this happens when my competitors have several different verified Google Business Profiles in locations that they're not truly in."

Now... that doesn't make any sense to me.

He's connecting two things that have basically nothing to do with each other.

Your verification is your verification. Your competitors are your competitors. Their status has nothing to do with your status.

It's like saying: "It's just so annoying that my grass keeps withering in the heat when people in another town get lots of rainfall."

Might be true for you but the grass still dies.

Complaining about a problem never solves anything. But you're actually making it so much harder to get to a constructive solution if you start connecting things to your problems randomly.

I worked with a client a while ago. He was a certain type of therapist. Let's say he was an "ABC Therapist".

So I go through his Google Business Profile. 10/10 of his competitors on the first page have "ABC Therapist" as their main category.

He had "THERAPIST" as his main category. So I changed it into "ABC Therapist".

Did a couple other things and within a day he jumped from page 3 to page 1.

So far so good. Everything's peachy.

Couple days later I talk to this client. He's happy with the boost in rankings. Because he's a smart guy it surprised me that he had the wrong main category on his profile. So I asked him why he picked "Therapist" instead of "ABC Therapist" as a category.

He told me: "Well, I saw that everyone was picking ABC therapist. And marketing is all about standing out. So I picked a different main category. To stand out, you know?"

It makes no sense. But to him it made total sense. To the point that he was confused by me asking it. Because it was so obvious. To him.

Human brains are weird. We connect all sorts of things that have nothing to do with each other and in our mind it just... works?

Always good to think about what you believe and ask yourself if it actually makes sense orrrrr if you're connecting things that aren't supposed to be connected.

Talk soon,

Arno

P.S. We help business owners like you get to the top 3 in Google in your area. When people look for your service they find... YOU. As they should.

If that's of interest to you - get in touch with us. Just reply to the email and let's see if we're a good match.