Google Business Profile Websites to Shut Down in March: Understanding the Implications

If your local business has a website created with Google Business Profiles, you’d want to know this: as of March 2024, such websites have been discontinued. Until June 10, customers will keep getting redirected to your Google Business Profile, but post that, they’ll be shown a “page not found” message. 

So, if you want your business to maintain its own page, you need to build a new website by employing alternative tools. Subsequently, you can add this new site address to your Google Business Profile (and all of this needs to be done by June 10th, of course). 

Want to wrap your head around the various aspects of this development? We’ve got you covered. In today’s blog, we walk you through everything that you might need to keep in mind with respect to the shutting down of Business Profile websites. Read on and find out!

Checking if You Have a Business Profile Website

This is pretty straightforward, actually; all you need to do is fire your business’ name into the Google search bar. Then, inside your Google Business profile, navigate to the “Contact” tab. There, you should be able to see a field named “Website”. Should you have a Business Profile website, this field will read “You have a website created with Google”. If the field is empty, you can add the link to your site over there. 

Alternative Site Builders to add to your Inventory

Here are some tools you can bank on to create a new page for your business:

• Squarespace
• Wix
• Google Sites
• GoDaddy
• WordPress
• Shopify

While Google Sites, Squarespace, Shopify, Wix, and GoDaddy are great for ecommerce, WordPress and its ilk such as Weebly, Durable and Strikingly are efficient site builders using which you can create new impactful websites and ad pages to replace your Business Profile site. 

Given WordPress’ already glowing reputation with respect to building robust and user-friendly websites, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the majority of the crowd flocking towards it. With WordPress, users get access to an array of plugins leveraging which they can amp up the functionality of their sites. 

What’s more, there are themes as well, pre-built visual designs that one can unlock with a simple mouse click; the best part? These themes can be changed at will, and you don’t even need to involve a web designer for the same. If at all, you want to hire a professional for your WordPress site, you won’t face any trouble finding one, for most web experts happen to cut their teeth with WordPress itself. 

You can either choose to get a one-click WordPress site from a WordPress web host like Hostinger and SiteGround (after you launch the website, you can modify its look using free themes) or you could make use of WordPress website builders, which allow you to create a page from the ground up without any coding knowledge, such as SeedProd, WPBakery, Avada, and DIVI. 

Additional Considerations

• If you have a custom domain in place to drive traffic to your Google Business Profile site, you’d need to change the configurations of your hosting company account so that your third-party domain directs traffic to the new page you build.
• If you had Google Ad campaigns linked to your Business Profile site, know that they would have stopped running by now. To resume those campaigns, you need to update the website link. 
• As soon as you set up a new page, communicate the same to your customers. Leverage all your channels starting from newsletter to social media to make sure that your audience gets word of any and all new developments you are effecting at the earliest. 

New Website is Ready. What Next? Local SEO!

Simply replacing your Google Business Profile website with a new page isn’t sufficient; you also need to boost its visibility by optimizing it for SEO. Here are some local SEO best practices you can implement to achieve this:

• Sprucing up your Google Business Profile is always a good place to start- add a concise yet clear-cut description of your business, mention your business hours, make sure to add the correct location as well as the contact number. Optimizing your Google Business Profile isn’t a lot of work and the dividends you can reap by being meticulous about it are rather rich. And why stop at Google Business Profile? Optimize all your other online listings too!
• Enlist yourself in local directories like Yellow Pages, Yelp, and Tripadvisor. The higher the number of local listings your business has from high-quality sources, the greater the favor you’ll be able to win from search engines. For improved results, you can look into identifying the search intent of every keyword in your database (normally, keyword intent can be classified into four types- informational, commercial, navigational, and transactional).
• Look to implement local keywords organically in your content. What are local keywords you ask? These are simply search terms that prospective customers in and around the vicinity of your business are most likely to use. You don’t need to embark upon this task manually; there are several local keyword research tools out there that promise to make your life a lot easier. 
• Apart from using local keywords, you also need to produce content that is relevant to the needs and interests of your local audience. From blogs to tutorials, you can create a wide variety of content to grab the eyeballs of your local audience.

Wrapping It Up

A large number of businesses used to rely on Business Profile sites to set up multiple profiles either for different locations or for separate divisions within the business; goes without saying that they have their work cut out following this new development. We hope the insights shared above will help you cope with the shutting down of Google Business Profile sites in a manner that is methodical and stress-free.