Duplicate listing for same business -1 SAB -1 Brick & Mortar

[nicoco]

I have a client who has two GBPs set up for his business (which is a service area business)
The first one is set up as a brick-and-mortar. Apparently, it was set up by mistake and is not optimized at all (no reviews, no photos, no services etc...)
The second one is correctly set up as a service area business and is the one the client is pushing and optimizing (it does have 20 reviews, photos, services, etc...)

Yet the 1st GBP listing seems to be the one that shows up the most in Google search results.
What is the best approach/process to merge these two listings and keep the second one (the one with reviews and photos) as the legitimate one considering they were created using different Google accounts? I'm assuming the business owner is also the owner of both Gmail accounts. What if he wasn't?

I know it's a lot but any guidance would be very welcome.

Thanks

 

[JS Girard]

First thing first, the only way to merge these is to make them both be at the same address or both SABs with identical business areas. You will need access to the other GBP to achieve this. Normally the trick is to request access to the GBP and if the client has no Gmail access, you will get an option to validate it for yourself after a few days of no answer, effectively "stealing" it away. Have you tried reporting the GBP first though?

Note that it looks like the client may be hit with the SAB negative effect bug, so removing the duplicate might well not help at all.

 

[nicoco]

First thing first, the only way to merge these is to make them both be at the same address or both SABs with identical business areas. You will need access to the other GBP to achieve this. Normally the trick is to request access to the GBP and if the client has no Gmail access, you will get an option to validate it for yourself after a few days of no answer, effectively "stealing" it away. Have you tried reporting the GBP first though?

Note that it looks like the client may be hit with the SAB negative effect bug, so removing the duplicate might well not help at all.

Thanks. Yes, I have tried the edit option but nothing happened. What should I do once both listings are set up as SAB with the same areas?

 

[JS Girard]

Editing the GBP is not what I mean (ytou cannot hide or show address that way), I meant literally reporting it as spam/not walk-in. If that works, your problem would be solved too.

Once you have the two GBPs set identically, you'll want to report them as duplicates. If those suggestions are still rejected (you know how to check that, right?), then you'll go to support. Support is usually pretty speedy with duplicates controlled by the same account.