Category: Google My Business

If you just sold your business, or need to change your Google Business Profile manager, you’ll need to change the primary owner. Changing the primary owner will enable the new owner or marketing team to have control over the Google Business Profile account.

Before you proceed, ensure you have primary user access to the Google Business Profile account – and five minutes of your time.

Follow these steps to change the primary owner:

1. Sign in to Google Business Profile

On your computer, sign in to Google Business Profile to access the manager tools page. Remember you need to be the primary user of this account to access the manager tools page and make changes. If you aren’t the primary user, you may need to forward this tutorial to the primary user of the account.

2. Choose a location

This step is necessary if your business has several locations. Click on the location you wish to manage to continue. You have to be sure to manage the right location as you apportion a new primary user to your business. This could be important if you wish to transfer primary user status to a part of your business based on location.

3. Select users

The Google Business Profile location screen allows you to manage everything from reviews to users of that location. You can also add a manager to the location if you wish to upgrade existing users to manager status.

4. Invite new users

If you sell your business or a part of it (a branch in a certain location), you’ll need to invite a new user. This is because you can’t confer primary owner status to a user not already on the platform. If this is the case, click on Add Users and add the new user’s email address. The next step is to select a role for them before sending them an invitation.

Be sure to also notify the new users about the invitation so they can check their inboxes for the invite and accept it accordingly. The roles you can assign the new user are Owner Manager or Site Manager. They also take up the roles as soon as they accept the invite.

5. Choose the new primary owner

Once you have the user on your Google Business Profile platform, go to the right of their name to see a menu with options to change user roles. From this menu, choose Primary Owner.

If you aren’t selling your business, conferring Primary Owner status to users, you need to proceed with caution. A user with this status can lock you out of the account as well as initiate other critical changes to your Google Business Profile. This can include adding new users and making them Primary Owners. You may consider other user levels, such as Site Manager and Manager.

6. Transfer business owners

All that remains now is to transfer control to the new primary user. You’ve successfully sold the business or have vetted the new user sufficiently to trust them with the management of your Google Business Profile account.

Keep in mind that there’s no going back once you assign users the primary user status. They’ll have the power to change account information, add other users, as well as edit other users among other abilities. When you’re sure of everything, you can click Transfer.

Changing the primary owner of your Google Business Profile account shouldn’t be a big deal if you follow these simple steps. You can also partner with us at Toast Local for a comprehensive audit of your Google Business Profile account setup and advise you on what to do to ensure it ranks higher on Google Maps. For more information or if you need any help, please contact us today.

Having a Google Business profile (or Google My Business as it’s often called) is a must for every business. It’s a quick and simple way to let potential customers know about your business, the products and services you offer, where you are located, and contact information.  You can also include pictures of your business and a link to your website. When people search for your business on Google, it will be one of the first things to catch their eye. The profile fits nicely on the right-hand column of the list of search results. It gives them all the information they need about your business at a glance, before going further and exploring your business’s website and content. Best of all, Google Business is free to use. What’s not to like?

Google Business profile is an important tool in making sure your business is seen and promoted (a must for SEO). It is simple to put together, however, it comes with one major flaw. It does not have an easy way to link to your business’s social media, like your LinkedIn or Facebook page.

Even now in 2022, there’s no way to be able to link them through the dashboard like you’re able to do when linking your main website. It’s a frustrating aspect of the Google Business profile. Your social media sites need to be seen and accessed quickly by current and potential customers just as much as your website. In fact, you may be wondering what the point is if not everything about your business can be included.

Here’s the good news; you actually can add your social media sites to your Google Business Profile. Google does not forbid you from doing it. You may know this already if you’ve seen other Google Business profiles that manage to have their social media sites linked. It just takes a bit of extra work.

How to Add Your Social Media Sites to Your Google Business Profile

Before beginning this process, make sure your business’s website has the ability to add a script. The main way to add your social media sites to your Google Business profile is through a script code that you want to add to the head or body of your website, according to a LinkedIn article written by Viral Your Website.

First, copy and paste the following code somewhere in Notepad or Word.

{ "@context" : "https://schema.org",
  "@type" : "Organization",
  "name" : "Your Organization Name",
  "url" : "https://www.your-site.com",
  "<span class="spelling">sameAs" :</span> [ "https://www.facebook.com/your-profile",
    "https://www.twitter.com/yourProfile",
    "https://plus.google.com/your_profile"] 
}

From there, edit the code with your business’s information:

• In the name section of the code where it says Your Organization Name, fill in the name of your business.
• Next, in the URL section of the code, add the link to your business’s website.
• In the same section of the code, add the links to all of your business’s social media sites.
• Once you’ve edited the code to your liking, you can paste it in the header or body of your business’s website.
• When you’ve done all that, test your code out here.

What’s the reason behind doing all of this? It will give further credibility to your business. It also helps Google to better understand what your business is and what it offers, giving you a huge boost in SEO. Also, it adds more information to your Google Business profile that customers can quickly access.

Perhaps someday in the future, businesses will be able to add their social media sites to their Google Business profiles as easily as they can add their main website. But until then, this process, while taking a bit of time, will work and net your business positive results. Contact us for more information about how to add your social media sites to your Google Business profile.