Recently, I went through the trouble of having my client (an attorney) set up the Google My Business messaging feature since I was not able to set it up for him. Once I sent a few emails back and forth with him to explain how to download the app and set it up, he finally got the confirmation box to appear.
However, when I sent him a test message, it never arrived. As the user sending the message, I didn’t receive any type of error that it didn’t go through. I brought this up to Google at a recent conference and was told that this is a known issue that is impacting listings that belong to location groups inside the Google My Business dashboard. This impacts all my clients since we are using the agency dashboard and every client is inside a location group. The issue appears to only be with listings that set up Messaging via the Google My Business app, not listings that set it up via SMS before Google removed that ability.
The amount of issues arising with messaging seems to conflict with the fact that Google is pushing these features and highlighting them more to customers. I’m not 100 percent sure why they would want to push it when so many pieces for merchants to manage it are still broken. One of the newest tests we have seen was pointed out by Sergey Alakov on Twitter. He highlights the message button with a “new” message.
Hopefully, Google comes out with a fix for some of these issues soon. We’d love to start actually setting up this feature for small businesses, but it’s hard to recommend a feature that doesn’t work.
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About The Author
Joy is the owner of the Local Search Forum and Sterling Sky in Canada. She is also the author of The Expert’s Guide to Local SEO, which is an advanced training manual for people wanting a detailed look at what it takes to succeed in the Local SEO space. She has been working in the industry since 2006. She is a faculty member at LocalU and enjoys speaking regularly at marketing conferences such as SMX, LocalU, Pubcon and State of Search. You can find her on Twitter or volunteering as a Product Expert on the Google My Business Forum.