Removing City and state from GMB business name

[HoosierBuff]

Hi,

I have a client that has several mattress stores. When they signed on, I realized that they had the city and state in their GMB business name. . . so, its <company name> - Chicago, IL etc.

They seem to rank fine today, but in reading Google's guidelines, this isn't what they want (at least right now, they did change this and change it back).

Do you think that this would put their traffic at risk if I removed city and state from the GMB business name? I was all ready to do it, and then I got a bit concerned.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Having the city name in the business name does seem to have a positive ranking impact. So yes, you could be at risk to hurt the ranking by removing it.

However, it would be even worse, and is likely, that it will eventually be reported as spam, which could result in the deletion of the listing all together.

 

[HoosierBuff]

Thanks for the response. I'm not sure which one to do, though, I think this client is pretty short term focused, so I'm leaning on not changing.

The other problem with this is that, if I do directory submission, do I include the name, or the name plus city and state to match the GMB listing. I think I'm stuck using the name plus city and state in the directory listings too.