Do I have to pay for a business card in Google Maps?

If unknown numbers keep calling you asking for money to “renew” your Google listing, you’re probably wondering whether you have to pay for a Google Maps listing at all. You don’t. A Google Business Profile is completely free. We don’t pay for its visibility, views or ranking. Sadly, some companies prey on business owners who don’t know this and try to squeeze money out of them.

I’ll explain how it works, what to watch out for and what you can do about it, because I really don’t like this kind of practice. I’ve had several calls from companies like this myself, so I decided to take a closer look.

What you need to know about Google Maps listings

• THEY ARE FREE
• We don’t pay for visibility, renewals or views
• Google employees don’t call us asking for payment
• Google doesn’t send paper invoices to customers
• We pay for all services with the card linked to our Google account, and we receive invoices by email

How do companies that extort money from business owners listed on Google Maps operate?

The greeting

Most of these scams are calls from call centre staff who introduce themselves in a way that makes you think you’re talking to a Google employee or a Google partner. The conversation usually includes names of services or entities connected with Google:

• Google Cloud
• Alphabet
• Google Team
• Google Support
• Google Partner, Certified Google Partner
• Local Guides

A Google Partner?

It can happen that the company calling us really does have Google Partner status. That only means it can manage our ads in a Google Ads account, which requires proper knowledge confirmed by training and certificates. You can check such partners here. However, it has nothing to do with paying for a Google Maps listing. If a company in the partner directory tries to extort money from you, it’s worth reporting it so it loses that status.

Are Local Guides calling you?

You or I can be a Local Guide, just by actively posting reviews or photos in Google Maps. So anyone could introduce themselves that way.

One of the companies linked to a high-profile scandal described on Niebezpiecznik is lokalniprzewodnicy.com.pl, who called me too. They say they work with Google and use the name of a programme created by Google, [Local Guides](https://maps.google.com/intl/pl/localguides/), which is a status for people who are active in Google Maps (they add photos and reviews, and suggest edits). I’m surprised Google hasn’t dealt with them yet, because this breaks the [Google policy for third-party companies managing a Business Profile](https://support.google.com/business/answer/7353941).

The Google Digital Marketing Fundamentals certificate

Some companies, however, consider getting a certificate such as “Fundamentals of Digital Marketing” to be the same as being a certified Google partner. You can get it for free on the Internetowe Rewolucje platform. It’s aimed at more ambitious business owners who want a better grasp of the subject. (I passed that exam myself and recommend it.) Having it doesn’t make us Google employees.

A Google recommended photographer

Some people may say they are Google Street View recommended photographers. Of course, they put it in a way that suggests they are “Google photographers” working directly for the Silicon Valley company. It’s yet another misleading claim that Google doesn’t like, but from what I can see, it doesn’t do much about it. It’s usually photographers selling virtual tours who do this.

A Google employee knocking at your door?

At the start of my career with virtual tours, before I knew how to promote myself online, I looked for clients on my own and talked to the owners of all kinds of venues. Sometimes I heard that “someone from Google had already been” and told them all sorts of tall tales to make them feel “chosen by Google”, and wanted to squeeze a lot of money out of them. Sometimes it’s whole agencies, where one or two people run around town looking for clients, someone else takes the photos and yet another person edits them. That pushes the price of the service well above the market rate.

The recommended photographer status does exist, and it only shows that we are active users of Google Street View and have added enough photos to get it. When I started making virtual tours, the verification process was more thorough. Sadly, these days an amateur with a phone can often get it.

An offer to renew your Google listing

Companies that want to con us usually work like teleshopping ads, giving us a super bargain offer we can’t refuse, only here and now! A bit like those sharks who sell sets of pots and kitchen appliances to elderly people at special demonstrations.

An offer you can’t refuse: pay or disappear!

These are usually amounts of several hundred zloty in various variants. It doesn’t matter whether they offer you PLN 100, 200, 300 or 400 for a year, two years or longer. They just want you to agree to receive an invoice for a service that is actually free. You’ll get a choice of PLN 200 a year or PLN 600 for life, and the only difference is how much money you throw down the drain.

The more brazen ones will scare us by saying that if we don’t pay the invoice, our business will vanish from search results, or other nonsense. As long as we have access to our listing and don’t share it, we can feel safe. Even if such a person reports in Google Maps that our business is closed, we can go to our profile and reject that suggestion.

Some of these companies may also offer SEO or managing your listing for a monthly fee. In that case some actual work has to be done, and there really are companies that do it, but here too it’s important to choose well. That’s a topic for another post, but in the meantime you can read on my blog what you can do yourself to improve your listing’s ranking for free in this post: How to improve your Google Maps listing ranking in 15 minutes (for free).

Is a Google listing paid?

Some companies can be so brazen that they send us ready-made invoices for the “renewal” by post or courier. It’s a typical psychological trick, because some people are afraid of having their listing removed or ending up in a debtors’ register over an unpaid invoice.

A law firm used a similar mechanism when it sent out pre-court demand letters at random for supposedly sharing files from Chomikuj (to random people who were innocent). Out of fear, though, they might have preferred to settle and pay PLN 3000 rather than PLN 185 thousand, which was the amount the losses were valued at. You’ll find the whole thread about it on Wykop.

I don’t want to advise here on what to do with such an invoice, but in my opinion we should pay for a service that was actually delivered. So if we never gave any consent, and never accepted any terms verbally or on any website, I think you can sleep easy.

Can a Google listing disappear from Google?

It can, but certainly not because we didn’t pay scammers to renew it. Only the owner of the listing can suspend it or ask Google to remove it. So if only you have access to the listing through your Gmail address and you’re not flagrantly breaking the Google Maps rules, you have nothing to worry about. Scammers use various psychological tricks and tell us that if we don’t pay, we’ll vanish from Google in 3 days.

Can Google employees call business owners?

Most phone calls with a Google employee are a response to our own request for contact. You can make that request on the support page. But such an employee will never ask us to pay for one service or another.

Below is a quote from the help centre, plus a link to the full article about how Google communicates with users. You’ll find information there about automated calls and Google employees: when and why they call, and most importantly that “We will not ask you to sign up for a service, make a payment or provide sensitive personal data.”

Google operators

You may receive calls from Google operators about developing your services, customer service or support related to Google Ads, Google Play or other Google accounts. Remember that Google never asks for payment information over the phone and never offers preferential terms for using its services.

You’ll find the whole article “How to recognise a scam phone call” at this address in the Business Profile help centre on Google: https://support.google.com/business/answer/6212928

Examples of scams

One example that got quite a lot of publicity, and there was evidence for it too. You can read about the whole situation on Niebezpiecznik, which describes the case of the company PCC System that made a lot of noise. As you can read there, PCC is also linked to the company lokalniprzewodnicy.com.pl that I mentioned at the beginning, and I had the pleasure of talking to them at one point too.

Watch out for these companies:

• Lokalni Przewodnicy
• PPC System
• ADD Projekt
• Web Holding

How to report scammers

Google has set up a special form on its website that we can use to report companies that tried to scam us.

Business Profile third-party policy: Report a violation – Google Business Profile Help

In this way many such companies have already been shut down in the US and Europe and forced to pay substantial compensation. We can go after them the same way in Poland, so your reaction to this kind of behaviour matters too.

What not to do

There are really loads of phone scams today. They can concern not only your Google listing but also other online and financial services and many more. Many of them rely on getting some of our personal data and information about us, which will help in a bigger scam or be sold on.

Don’t give out your details over the phone

If you get a call from an unknown number and someone asks you to verify your personal data, you’re already giving them valuable information. It’s worth checking such a number at least in Google to see whether it’s on some blacklist. They are often also described in comments by other people who were called from the same number. Another great solution is special apps that automatically check blacklists of suspicious numbers and flag such incoming calls for us.

Not sure who is calling? Call them yourself

You can call yourself, but on the number given on the website of, say, the bank that someone was trying to impersonate. I once had a situation with my XTB brokerage account where someone with an Eastern accent told me about money that had multiplied on my account by itself, thanks to cryptocurrencies (which had bought themselves), and we only had to verify my details for the payout. I called my account manager (they assign one when you open an account) and told him about the situation, and he passed it on to the right department.

List of certified partners

If a company says it’s a “certified Google partner”, we can check that directly on Google’s website. But that doesn’t rule out one department of the company handling SEO and Google ads, while they also have someone who makes calls and pressures people into listing “renewals”, or into buying poor-quality SEO or fake reviews.

You can check Google partners here: https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/partners/find-a-partner

You can report these dishonest companies here: https://support.google.com/business/contact/gmb_3p_complaints

Check reviews online

If a company calls you, you can always ask for its name and the employee’s details. You can check reviews of the number itself and of the company, and also check whether that same phone number is a contact for the company, in case someone is pretending to be an employee of another firm.

Ranking your Google listing in Maps

There really are agencies that will help us fill in or manage our business profile, but they work differently from the scammers described above, and they don’t take money for nothing. Ranking a Google listing isn’t rocket science. It’s worth establishing in advance what we’re actually paying for, because you can’t buy a position in Google or Google Maps results. We can buy a Google Ads campaign with location extensions, but that requires not only an agency fee but also an ad budget, because these are paid search results. If we want to play the long game, we need to take care of things like:

• up-to-date information on the listing
• correct details (phone number, website address, opening hours)
• filling in missing information
• writing a business description
• adding services
• adding photos
• collecting reviews and replying to them

We can do it ourselves or hand it over to an agency. Your choice.

The listing itself is free and nobody should take money for it. You only pay for what you show in it: photos of your venue and a 360 virtual tour that a customer can walk through before the visit.