Your Google listing is the first thing people see. Often it's wrong.
Profile correction, review reporting and appeals, suspension reinstatement and monthly management for Lowcountry businesses.
Four things that go wrong, and what each costs to fix.
Take one or take all four. Most businesses need the first and the last; the middle two are for when something has actually broken.
Your listing is filed under the wrong category, one mediocre photo is doing all the visual work, and twenty years of finished jobs are invisible.
- Primary and secondary categories corrected, service areas and description rewritten
- Fifteen to twenty finished-project photos loaded and sequenced so your best work leads
- Every existing review answered in your voice, drafted by me, approved by you
- Past-customer review campaign — list built from your records, sent from your address in waves over eight weeks
- Hours, services, attributes and Q&A completed and seeded
- Weekly progress email while it runs
Reviews you earned have vanished, or reviews that break Google's rules are sitting on your listing dragging the average down.
- Full audit of every review the profile has ever received, against what is showing today
- Policy reports through Google's Reviews Management Tool for reviews that genuinely violate its rules — fake reviews, competitor attacks, spam, wrong business, off-topic abuse
- The one appeal Google allows on a refused report, batched up to ten reviews at a time, argued properly
- For reviews Google removed in error: escalation through Business Profile support — see the honest limits on this below
- A written record of every review, what was done about it, and what Google said back
- Plain-English summary of what came back and what did not
Your profile has been suspended or disabled and you are, as far as Google Maps is concerned, closed.
- Diagnosis of what triggered it before anything is submitted
- Underlying policy problems fixed first, so the appeal isn't refused on sight
- Supporting documentation assembled — registration, licence, tax certificate, utility bill
- One appeal submitted properly, with evidence attached inside Google's 60-minute window
- Escalation and re-appeal if the first decision goes against us
- Priority work — this one starts the day you call
The profile stays right, stays current, and keeps collecting reviews instead of going quiet again.
- Monthly project photos loaded as new work finishes
- Every new review answered within two business days, drafted for your approval
- Review requests continuing as part of your job closeout
- Categories, services, hours and attributes audited each month
- New removals or filtering caught and appealed as they happen
- Monthly report — rating, review count, searches, calls, website clicks
The usual situation
A business has been good at what it does for twenty or fifty or seventy years. Then you search for it and find a listing filed under the wrong category, one photo taken mid-job doing all the visual work, a handful of reviews nobody ever replied to, and no sign of the hundreds of finished projects sitting in a folder on someone's phone.
Nobody did that on purpose. Somebody claimed the listing once, filled in what the form asked for, and got on with running the business. Meanwhile that listing became the first thing every prospective customer sees — ahead of the website, ahead of the referral, ahead of the reputation.
Restoring reviews that disappeared
This is the one most business owners don't know is fixable. Google removes and filters reviews constantly, and a meaningful share of what it takes down is legitimate — a real customer's real review, gone, often with no notice and no explanation.
Common causes: the reviewer had no photo or review history and got caught by a spam filter; several reviews arrived in a short window and tripped a velocity check; a review was left on a device or network Google associated with the business; the profile was edited heavily around the same time. None of those mean the review was fake. They mean an automated system made a call.
I audit every review the profile has ever received against what is actually showing today, and work out what went missing and when. Where a review looks to have been caught wrongly, the route in the United States is escalation through Google Business Profile support — Google acknowledges its automated spam detection sometimes removes legitimate reviews and points you there. There is no self-serve reinstatement tool for this in the US, no published timeline, and no guaranteed outcome. I will make the case as well as it can be made and tell you plainly what came back.
The other half of the same job is reviews that should come down and have not. Genuinely fake reviews. A competitor's attack. Spam and advertising. A review left on the wrong business entirely. Abuse and off-topic rants that have nothing to do with the service. Those get reported through Google's Reviews Management Tool with the specific policy cited, and their status tracked.
If a report comes back "no policy violation" and it plainly is one, Google allows a single appeal — up to ten reviews per submission. One shot, so it is worth arguing properly rather than firing off immediately, which is most of what you are paying me for.
The line I won't cross. I don't try to remove negative reviews that describe something real. Google's own guidance is explicit — do not report a review just because you disagree with it or dislike it — and the FTC's rule on consumer reviews prohibits suppressing honest criticism through false claims or groundless threats. A bad review that's true stays up. The answer to it is a good reply and twenty better reviews around it, which is what the rest of this page is for.
When the whole profile gets suspended
Different problem, much more urgent. A suspended profile disappears from Maps and from the local results entirely — to anyone searching, you have closed.
It usually follows something specific: an address change, a category change, a name that didn't match the signage, a virtual office or a home address that looked like one, several edits in quick succession, or a keyword-stuffed business name. Sometimes it follows nothing anyone can identify.
The mistake almost everyone makes is appealing immediately, before fixing whatever caused it — which burns the appeal and makes the next one harder. Google is explicit that you shouldn't file repeat appeals on the same issue while one is pending, so the first attempt genuinely matters. I diagnose first, fix the underlying problem, assemble the documentation, then submit once, properly, with the evidence attached inside the sixty-minute window Google allows.
How review generation works here
Once the profile is right, the job is a steady flow of recent reviews rather than a burst. A list is built from your own records, the outreach goes out from your email address rather than mine — it carries no weight coming from a marketing person — and it goes in waves of five to eight a week so it doesn't look like a review dump and trip the filter that caused half your missing reviews in the first place.
Every customer gets the same request. Nobody is filtered out because of what you think they'll say. Nothing is offered in exchange — no discount, no entry into a draw, nothing. Nobody is told what to write or how many stars to give. That's Google's policy and it's federal law under the FTC's rule on consumer reviews, and I won't bend either, partly because doing so risks your listing entirely and partly because it's the sort of thing that ought to go without saying.
What I need from you
Manager access to the profile — you keep ownership and can revoke it in one click. A list of past customers with names and email addresses. The outreach sent from your own address. Approval on review responses before they post. Photos as new work finishes.
Roughly an hour of your time to start, then a few minutes a month.
I will never ask you for a Google verification code. Not once, not for any reason. Anyone who does — by phone, text or email — is trying to take your listing. That is the single most common way local businesses lose control of their Google presence.
What I am not promising
Not a 5.0. A realistic target is 4.4 to 4.5 inside ninety days for most businesses, and negative reviews describing something that actually happened will almost certainly stay.
On recovery work specifically: Google decides, not me. Reporting a rule-breaking review has a defined process and a reasonable hit rate. Getting a wrongly-removed review put back does not — in the US that is a support escalation with no published timeline and no formal appeal, and plenty of them go nowhere. Anyone quoting you a success rate on that is guessing. If I look at your profile and think the case is weak, I will say so before you pay me anything.
The generation side depends on how many past customers can actually be reached. If your list turns out to be short, I'll tell you that up front too.
Send me your website. I'll tell you what's wrong with it.
Free, no call required. A three-minute video within 24 hours: what's slow, what breaks on a phone, where you're invisible on Google, and the three things I'd fix first.