Connecting your firm’s Google+ Brand Page with the Google Local Page

Google, its services and apps can be daunting to navigate, even for experienced marketers and savvy businesses owners. The second you think that you’ve got it all figured out, a new update happens and seems to make a mess of everything.

This is what happened when Google launched Google+ Local.

If your firm has a G+ business page, you may have discovered within the last year Google created a separate but nearly duplicate ‘verified local’ listing for your firm, resulting in two similar Google+ pages for one brand.

Having more than one G+ page poses many challenges for a business. Not only will it dilute the brand of the business, but it will also confuse your internal team as well as your clients. To maintain a strong and focus brand, it’s best to only have one central page for your brand on each social media channel.

On your original G+ business page, you may have been posting regular updates about your firm and have gathered great followers.

On the duplicate G+ local page, there typically isn’t any sharable content or followers but there may be Google reviews about your business from customers. In addition, this page is the official ‘verified’ page that is recognized by Google and will be the page that shows up more frequently in search results.

Each page has valuable assets organizations want to keep. At Industrial Brand, we experienced this exact same problem and could not decide which G+ page to maintain. But our timing was good. As of June, 2014, companies have the ability to transfer elements of the verified local page (ie. the verification, reviews, full address) to the older, content rich brand page. Once the transfer is complete, you can then delete the local page, resulting in one centralized G+ page for your firm that is not only verified and optimized for Google search, but also retains your content and followers.

To help you connect your G+ pages, we’ve documented the steps we took in the section below:

1. When we logged into Google+ on the Manage Pages section, two G+ properties appear. One is a verified local page with a small grey checkmark badge beside the business name, and the other is our original business G+ page where we share regular updates and have a following
   
   
2. To initiate the transfer, make sure that you’re logged into Google as the primary owner of the G+ page and click on Managed This Page for the local G+ page (the one with the grey checkmark badge).
3. Once the the verified local G+ page loads, click on the gear icon near the top right corner and choose Settings.
4. Once in Settings, scroll down to a section called Profile near the bottom the page, and look for “This page is connected to Google Maps”. From there, click on Change or Link a Different Page to this Location and choose your main brand G+ page (the one with the followers) as the one that you would like to connect to Google Maps.

5. Confirm your changes and the elements from the current verified local page will be transferred to the brand page.
6. Once the transfer is done, you will be prompted by Google to delete the former local page. The former local page will automatically be named as ‘Backup of …’ and you can delete that page whenever you’re ready. We recommend that you take the time to double check all elements from the local page have been successfully transferred before deleting the backup.

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