I’ve had numerous offices reach out to me saying, “Google called our office and said that our profile is out of date. I gave them your information.” I’m so glad that these offices responded this way. Beware: unscrupulous companies are calling dental offices and other businesses (including the Pro Impressions Marketing office!) to try to get you to sign up for various web marketing services.

What to Listen For
Whether it’s a recording or a live person, if they refer to themselves as “Your Google Representative”, you can just hang up. The only exception is if a member of the Pro Impressions Marketing team calls ahead of time to let you know that Google is going to be calling with a code. Then you can anticipate the call within a minute or two and it will be an automated service giving you a 6-digit code. Anything beyond that is a solicitation. Google simply doesn’t reach out to businesses by phone- third-party vendors do. We don’t need to talk to them. They are on the hunt for people who are afraid to make a marketing mistake and are simply unaware that talking to the wrong people can lead to the very thing that they are afraid of.

What to Do
Feel free to give the person calling my information. Have them call me. It’s rare, but sometimes they will actually call me and say, “Joanna told me that you help them with their marketing. I’m a Google representative.” Then I start asking them point-blank questions about what they want and quickly it comes out that they are selling a directory service of some sort for $99.95 per month or something ridiculous. It’s a numbers game to them: they don’t really do anything. They just want to sign up a bunch of people and collect those little payments.

Google Does Send Email 
If you get an email that says something about Google in it, it could very well be from Google! Google does send emails. Most of the time they will be something that we have also received, but please go ahead and forward those emails to me and I will be sure to look them over for any actionable information to either improve or protect your office’s visibility on Google. Thanks for your help!