Companies Merge - At Home Services - 10+ GMB's

[LocalGoon]

Hi Local SEO people.
I'm in a situation where two multi-location at-home service companies (each with 10+ aged and established Google My Business profiles) are about to merge.
I’m personally aiming to retain these great GMB assets, but I also want to go through a rebrand for the company being merged into the other.

From my experience with any name change with GMB's is usually a tiring and sometime risky process that requires a reverification.


Has anyone here gone through a similar process?
would love to hear some tips or stuff i should watch out for , so after the merge we could retain maximum GMB traffic.

Thanks in advance for any input!

 

[ElizabethRule]

Are all the listings verified to different addresses, and will the business be legally retaining all of these locations after the merge? If so, I would likely go the route of just rebranding each listing.

You should likely merge the brand domains into 1 domain with the new branding first. This will help Google understand these two businesses have now merged into 1. Add a press release to the site and explain to users (and Google) about the merge. Make sure all the addresses you have GBPs for are on the site under the new name. Also, update signage at each location to match the new brand, take photos & upload them to the GBPs.

From there, clean up valuable citations like local/government business directories, BBB, Yelp etc to reflect the new brand. Scrub the GBPs of mentions of the old brand, including description + logos.

Then you can edit the major elements of the GBP to match the new brand. These are the edits most likely to trigger a reverification. Make sure to edit major elements like name, website, phone number (if applicable) a few days apart to avoid triggering any red flags with Google. Also, make sure all profiles have unique phone numbers, to avoid duplicate profile issues.