A digital footprint is the lifeblood of success for many small businesses, but one local business says they became unsearchable when their online profile disappeared.
Daiana Maza and her father Ernesto Maza run Towing Miami Express, a small towing service in Miami.
For the last four years, they have seen a steady stream of customers, in part due to the use of an online Google business profile.
“Google is the most powerful engine of the world right now,” Daiana Maza said.
For many small businesses, Google business profiles have become an invaluable marketing tool. It allows for customers to see the business’ location, customer reviews and contact information. It also helps the business show up in search results.
But the most powerful tool in their arsenal stopped working a little more than a month ago when their Google profile was shut down.
In an email from Google, they were told their business didn’t meet the requirements to have a profile.
“Nobody could find us, and we literally lost like 99 percent of our work,” Daiana Maza said.
That same email offered Daiana and Ernesto the chance to appeal Google’s decision, a process they participated in by sending emails with Google employees and sending over paperwork related to their business.
But when days turned to weeks, they started to worry.
“It was five weeks, and we were already pretty much bankrupt, so we were desperate, and we had no other choice,” Daiana Maza said.
That’s when they contacted NBC6 Responds.
“We are about to lose our house, we are about to lose our cars, we are about to lose our trucks, the employees, like everything,” Daiana Maza said.
We reached out to Google. In a statement, a company spokesperson told us: “We reviewed this case in detail and are working with the business to help them make some necessary edits to their profile. We aim to resolve issues in a helpful and timely way and are always improving how we do that.”
Within days, the business profile was back up and searchable online, but we never got a direct answer as to why it was taken down in the first place.
According to information Google provides online, they have guidelines for how businesses should represent themselves and these rules are enforced using automation, human review and user feedback.
Though their profile is back up and is searchable, their profile currently does not have the years’ worth of customer reviews it once had. We reached out to Google about that, and Maza says they are still working to get those incorporated into their Google profile.