Google Business Profiles lets you see what business listings offer service-wise, they’ve been doing this for a while now, and now they seem to impact your local rankings. But what is new and scary is that Google is making up pricing for your services that are almost always incorrect and sometimes dangerous for that businesses.
Carrie Hill and Sukhjit S Matharu spotted this and posted a couple of examples, one from a client and one from some random business. In both cases, the pricing Google listed are incorrect. She said her client is not offering these services for free, despite what Google says. And her client’s competitors are not offering bed bug inspection for only $1 and $100.
Here is what Sukhjit S Matharu shared on Twitter, saying “when looking into a client’s services in their GBP, we noticed that some of the predefined services had a “free” label which we nor the client added.”
Here is what Carrie Hill shared on Twitter saying “Here’s another where pricing is arbitrarily added in – not from the client… certainly not correct!”
Joy Hawkins, a local SEO, also confirmed this is new.
I wonder if this is easy for the business to fix by going into their Google Business Profiles and editing their services. But I suspect most of these businesses have no clue Google added these prices to their services and it might lead to some bad reviews if a customer is charged or quoted more than what is listed in Google Search.
This reminds me when Google Local Service Ads estimated pricing, which upset many businesses.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
