The Easiest (Advanced) Way To Claim Local Listings for A Service Area Business On Google

Sometimes, a service area business listing (without a visible address) may already be claimed under a Google account you can't access. In such cases, Google requires you to create a new listing, verify it, and then merge it with the existing live listing.

This process can take weeks before you gain control of the live listing, and it often leads to issues with duplicate listings if Google doesn’t merge them properly. This workaround makes claiming the service area business (SAB) listing possible without creating a duplicate, and it’s also a much faster process. As an added bonus, this hack makes it impossible for someone to hold your listing hostage. Here are the steps to take:

1? Find the Google Places ID for the listing you want to claim. Place IDs are not the same thing as CIDs . The easiest way to get the place ID for a listing is to pull it up in Google Maps and use the Pleper Chrome extension .

Go to https://business.google.com/arc/p/ Google-PlaceID-Here , which will take you to the same place as if you were trying to claim a regular (non-SAB) listing.

2? Once you fill out the form, you’ll get an email confirming your ownership request. Do not delete this email because you’ll need it to file an appeal in case the existing owner of the listing denies your request to transfer ownership.

3? The current owner has 3 days to respond to the request. If they don’t respond in that time, you may be able to verify to gain access.

4? If they grant you access within 3 days, your account becomes the primary owner, and they are demoted to a manager. This means you can go in and remove them if needed.

5? If they deny you access or don’t respond in 3 days, pull up the email you received like the picture above, and click “view request”.

6? If they denied you access, you should see a button to appeal. If they didn’t respond, you should see a button that says “verify”. Both of these buttons do the same thing – they allow you to verify the listing.

7? Once you verify the listing, it immediately boots the other user out completely and you are now the primary owner.

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