What SEOs can learn from Google’s new Transparency Report

let me catch you up on some local search stuff

April 14, 2025

Hi everyone,

Here’s what’s made an impression on me in the local SEO world recently 👇️

1. It’s almost impossible to delete a Google Business Profile, unless…

… you suspend it?

GBPs are notoriously difficult to delete, but I was talking to a local SEO friend recently, and he told me a brilliant tip:

  1. Strip the Profile down to one owner on a throwaway Google account.

  2. Make a bunch of edits to get it suspended.

  3. Once it’s suspended, it will no longer appear in Google search.

So, if you have pissed off all of your customers, I guess you can wipe your bad reputation off of Google 😅

‼️ Disclaimer: Neither my friend nor I have personally tried this method, so if you decide to give it a go, proceed with caution (and pls lmk how it goes 👀).

See what people had to say about this on LinkedIn.

2. Can home-based businesses have a Google Business Profile?

Yes, they can, but there are a few rules 👇

I go into detail on all these points in my recent post — check it out here.

3. Google confirmed what local SEOs have been saying for ages

Adding descriptions to your Google Business Profile Services “enhances your online presence and drives business growth.”

Look at the example they give in their most recent guidelines update 👇️

Which business would you pick:

  • The one that has vague, one-word services with no additional info,
    or

  • The one that has taken the extra step of writing what each service gets you, how long it takes, how much it costs, and how you can book it?

Local SEOs have been saying this forever, but maybe you’ll finally listen now that Google has confirmed the conversion power of a fully optimized Services section 😅

4. 1 Billion (yes, with a “B”) customer reviews were published on Google last year.

Here’s what surprised me in Google’s new Transparency Report 👇

1. Nearly 1 billion customer reviews were published.

Out of those, 245 million were removed:

  • 188 million reviews were fake or misleading

  • the rest were “vandalism”, off-topic, or were written from a restricted Google account

Google says that a lot of their review monitoring is done by their AI, which explains why many honest businesses lost their legitimate reviews over the past year.

2. The business categories that received the most reviews were as follows:

  1. food and drink

  2. shopping

  3. services

  4. entertainment

  5. health and wellness

  6. hotels and lodging

At first I was surprised that hotels were in 6th place, but it makes sense: there are hundreds of restaurants and bars in every city, but there are much fewer hotels.

So, if we’re just looking at the number of reviews, the former category will obviously get a lot more reviews. However, if we were to calculate the average number of reviews hotels get, the lodging category would probably come in at number 2 on this list.

3. 752 million photos and videos were published by users.

This number is way smaller than the number of reviews published. This means that many customers leave reviews without accompanying images and videos, and not a lot of people are adding photos to businesses.

4. 94 million suggested edits were published.

The most edited attributes were:

  1. name

  2. location

  3. hours

  4. address

  5. category

  6. website

I think this order would look very different if local SEOs didn’t exist. Without spam fighting and black-hat SEO, I think hours would be the #1 thing customers edit on GBPs.

Also, the fact that changing the location (aka the map pin) is the second most common edit shows just how widespread the map pin hack* was.

If only there was a magical software that stops people from messing with your Google Business Profile… Oh wait, there is - it’s the Whitespark Local Platform and it only costs $1/mo. Check it out 👇️

*Even though Google recently made an announcement that the map pin problem has been fixed, they didn’t provide any details as to how it was fixed, so I’m still a little skeptical.

If you haven’t yet, follow me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok so you don’t miss my local SEO content that doesn’t make it into this newsletter!

Darren