One morning the listing is gone. Customers who search your business name see nothing, the Maps pin has disappeared, and inside your account there is a notice saying the profile has been suspended. For a business that gets most of its walk-in trade through Maps, this is not an inconvenience. It is the phone going quiet.
The good news is that the process for getting it back is documented and it is not complicated. The bad news is that most of the advice circulating about it is wrong, and some of that advice will make your situation worse.
What Google actually says, and what it does not
Google's own wording is broad. It says it may suspend or disable profiles that do not follow its guidelines, and that is close to the whole of it. There is no published list titled "reasons a profile gets suspended", so any ranked list of causes you read online has been worked out by people who deal with a lot of suspensions, not quoted from Google.
Two terms you will see everywhere are worth ignoring. Soft suspension and hard suspension are phrases invented by practitioners. They appear nowhere in Google's documentation. Google uses suspended, disabled, removed and restricted, and it treats a restriction as a separate and lesser action than a suspension.
There is one thing Google does state plainly, and it matters: if your Google Account itself is restricted rather than just the profile, every profile you manage is suspended along with it, and you cannot create or claim new ones. The account has to be sorted out first. Appealing the profile while the account is restricted gets you nowhere.
The things that most often trip a business up
These are all published rules rather than guesses, and each of them is broken routinely by businesses acting in good faith.
The business name. Google's guidelines say the name cannot include marketing taglines, store codes, trademark symbols, fully capitalised words, opening hours, phone numbers, web addresses, service or product descriptions, or location information. That last one catches a great many Nigerian businesses. "Adeola Catering Lekki" is a name plus a location, and the location is not part of the registered name.
The address. A PO box or a mailbox in a remote location is not acceptable. A virtual office, meaning an address you rent but do not operate from, is not eligible at all. A coworking desk is only eligible if that office has clear signage, receives customers during opening hours and is staffed by your own people during those hours.
The categories. Google says categories must not be used as keywords or to describe features of the business, and must not be chosen to match other nearby businesses. Stacking categories you do not actually operate in is a rule breach, not a clever trick.
Signage. If your profile shows an address, Google expects permanent fixed signage carrying your business name at that address. This is the rule most often broken by businesses run from a residential estate.
The appeal, step by step
Google still runs an appeals tool and it is the correct route. Before you open it, read the guidelines and fix whatever is wrong, because appealing an unchanged profile usually produces the same answer twice.
Open the appeals tool, confirm you are signed in with the account that manages the profile, and select the profile you are appealing for. The tool shows you the reason for the action and a link to the specific policy that was breached, so you are not guessing.
You will then be offered the chance to attach evidence. It is optional and Google recommends it strongly. What it accepts is official business registration, a business licence, tax certificates, and utility bills in the business name such as electricity, phone, water or internet.
Two details here catch people out. Once you open the evidence form you have sixty minutes to submit it, or it will not be attached to the appeal. And the business name and address on every document must match the profile you are appealing for. A CAC certificate in a slightly different trading name is a wasted submission.
Then submit. Google says appeal reviews and decisions can take up to five working days, and you get the outcome by email.
Three things not to do while you wait
Do not create a new profile for the same business. Google states this directly on two separate pages. It is the single most common self-inflicted injury in this whole process, and it turns a recoverable suspension into a duplicate listing problem on top of a suspension.
Do not submit more appeals for the same issue. Google asks you to wait for a decision before submitting again.
Do not keep editing the profile. Fix what breached the guidelines, then leave it alone until the decision arrives.
If the appeal is refused
There is a second route. Google says that only if your reinstatement request is denied, it may be able to carry out an additional review to prove your eligibility, and there is a separate contact form for that. Businesses in the UK and the European Economic Area have a further option of referring the matter to an out of court dispute settlement body, which is not available elsewhere.
Beyond that, the honest position is that Google does not owe anyone a listing, and some suspensions are not reversed. That is a reason to get the profile right while it is healthy rather than to negotiate afterwards.
One thing worth checking now, while yours is fine
Read your own profile against the four rules above. The name, the address, the categories and the signage. It takes ten minutes and it is the difference between a listing that keeps working and one that disappears on a Tuesday for a reason you set up two years ago.
Our free deep digital audit checks your Google presence from the outside, which includes the things that most often get a profile actioned, and tells you what to fix before it becomes urgent.