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We have two sister companies that are merging into one new brand. One is the sales/marketing side, the other is the SaaS side. The sites will be merging into a new site so we wanted to do the same with our GMBs.

There are GMBs for each, with 14 reviews and 35 reviews. HQ for merged company will be at GMB with 35 reviews.

Questions

  • Should we try to merge GMBs to keep reviews? If so would reviews make sense if they are referencing the old individual brands? Or if most of them generally reference the services it should be ok?
  • Should we create a new GMB for the new brand? This will be located at the same address as one of the existing GMBs, so could cause conflict with verification
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It is not possible to merge two separate Google My Business listings - Google Reviews are stuck to the listing they were left on forever.

You should keep both Google My Business listings active and update the business information on the listing that has the most reviews for the new brand.

I would also recommend changing the website URL on the unchanged listing to a webpage on the new website that explains the merger: "Example Company is Now New Company" with links to the pages on the new site that correspond to the services/product pages that a customer looking for the former company would be looking for.

You should not create a separate Google My Business listing for the new company because of the same address conflict that you described in your question.

Remember to submit updated NAP (name, address, phone number) information to aggregators like Yext for the renamed/re-branded listing. There are tools such as BrightLocal that distribute citations for you. I'm fairly certain that SEMrush has a local citation tool as well.

This Moz article (and others in the series) will help you quite a bit in this process.

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  • thanks for the response but Google support is able to merge GMB listings. I also don't see how having two GMBs active makes sense as both old businesses are becoming a single new one, we need search engines to understand the old business don't exist at an individual level
    – Rob T
    Sep 12, 2021 at 15:27
  • Google will merge duplicate listings - yours are not duplicates they are separate businesses. support.google.com/business/thread/12829736/… If you talk to Google support maybe they'll allow you to merge the listings, however, this would only apply to your site and not others.
    – Mike Ciffone
    Sep 12, 2021 at 17:37
  • If you change info on the GMB listing that has 35 reviews to the single new business you'll retain the value of those reviews. If you leave the GMB listing with 15 reviews alone, not changing anything, then it will not conflict with the new business (assuming it has unique NAP info) and existing users will still be able to find it - if they hit the website link, they'll be informed about the merger. Then, after a while has passed you can deactivate the business listing.
    – Mike Ciffone
    Sep 12, 2021 at 17:44

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