Alert: Limited Google My Business functionality due to COVID-19.

In light of COVID-19, Google, announced last Friday that they will be operating with a limited team and as a result, there may be some temporary limitations and delays with support issues.

Google's current focus will be on the quality and reliability of the information on Google Search and Maps. Google wants to make sure both users and business owners continue to have access to essential features like whether the business is open or has special hours.

For newly created listings, claims, and verifications support Google's team will be manually reviewing those for critical health-related businesses. They will be prioritizing critical services and to expect delays for publication of new listings, claims, and verifications for other types of businesses to Google Search and Maps.

New reviews, review replies, and Q&A will be unavailable during this time. Q&As have been removed completely from the listing. The review link is still there and customers can still leave a review, but those reviews will not appear on the listing at this time. In fact, those reviews may not ever appear on those listings. So you may want to change your strategy and work on gaining more reviews on other platforms such as Facebook, Zillow, Yelp and so on.

For those of us in the Reputation Management space managing several locations, this is going to be a challenge since we can not respond to reviews in general. Leaving negative reviews unanswered will likely have an unfavorable impact, in my opinion.

If your business has been affected by COVID-19 - Google suggests updating your GMB profile to provide the most accurate information to your customers - operating hours, temporary closures, etc. Even though it may take a little bit for the updates to reflect on your GMB listing, Google still suggests making those updates.

Until Google makes those updates, you do have another option that you can utilize now if you are not already doing so, and that is by creating posts with detailed updates about what is going on with your business, hours changes, products, and services due to limited staff. That way you are directly communicating with your customers on a regular basis as your business changes.

Please note that when adding a photo to a post that the photo should be at least 400 pixels wide by 300 pixels tall. Once you upload the picture(s) to click on the edit tool and to ensure the entire image will be visible, otherwise, the image will be cropped once posted and you can't go back and edit the photo.

Source: https://bit.ly/GMBupdateCOVID19 and https://bit.ly/GMBcovid19update

–––––– UPDATE: 4.13.2020 ––––––

ALERT: For those of you in the local space. - GOOGLE MY BUSINESS REVIEWS you are now able to respond to your reviews once again.

This has been verified on two different Google My Business listings and you can once again respond to reviews!

Q & A's are not back up and running yet, but hopefully soon.