Setting up GMB account for enterprise business (500+ locations)

[LizP]

Hi, all,
Hope I'm publishing this in the right area. Looking for advice from anyone with experience setting up a GMB locations (business) group account on an enterprise scale. I'm the sole SEO and will be working with Doctor.com on local presence / reviews, but want to see what you smart people would suggestm

Background:
--Company is a major healthcare entity with 60k+ employees, 20+ hospitals, 500+ ambulatory care centers and has been blase about their local presence, especially on GMB.
--Some locations are claimed/verified, but under a hodgepodge of owners and on personal Gmail accounts (shoot me now)
--Currently no process in place for claiming new entities or closing old ones. (Actually, there's no process for anything GMB-related.)

My initial take on this is to:
--Set up a "grey" email in our domain: Local@[companyname].com, Google-enable it, and have that be the "primary owner" of all locations and business groups
--Have the people who currently own locations to transfer their locations to this new primary owner account
--All new GMB locations that we verify will make this email the primary owner, so no one person in the company holds all the keys.
--To keep track of changes and requests, set up a kanban board? Or Agile board?

TIA for any help!

 

[keyserholiday]

You are on the right track. You don't need any help from us. The quicker you can get all of the locations into one account the better. You can ask for bulk verification as long as.
A. you are an owner on 10 listings
B. you have all of the locations in your account
C. all of the locations are listed on your website

If you set up the account using your company domain, it will speed up the process. I had to gain control of 342 locations and they were all under individual accounts. I set up a spreadsheet to track what we had control of and which ones we were still awaiting access for. It took a few weeks to complete. I also move all locations off Google sheets and into our CRM to manage the data. We then set up Yext to manage the listings and it smoothed out the process as we could better manage the edits and data changes.

 

[LizP]

Thanks! I appreciate you taking the time to read and respond! Google Sheets may be the easiest way to keep track of changes and approvals for now too. Hearing it took you a few weeks is encouraging. (Of course, who knows with the virus.) Thanks again!

 

[keyserholiday]

If you get stuck, need help, advice or any other encouragement, please let me know. I have done it 3 times and the first time was the super difficult based on the size of the franchise and they way that they set up GMB.