A Google Business Profile Stuck for 19 Months, Fixed the Week It Cleared
A verification ticket pending since February 2025, a silent service-listing bug found and root-caused, and a blog post rebuilt around facts instead of filler
Read This Before the Results Section
The Business Profile work below was two days old when this page was first published. It happened on 2026-09-10 and 2026-09-11, inside a larger project that began September 2, 2026: moving the site off GoDaddy's Airo AI site builder to an SEO-built WordPress site. At first publication there was no ranking, traffic, or impression data. The Update, October 2026 section near the end now adds Search Console numbers, with one limit stated plainly: Search Console has data for this domain only from September 1, 2026, so there is no before-baseline to compare against.
The Challenge
The client's Google Business Profile verification ticket dated to February 2025. It sat pending for about a year and a half, a delay on Google's side that no business owner or prior agency could shorten. It cleared this week: fully verified, no restriction, canModifyServiceList: true, status OPEN, confirmed field by field.
A profile that has been effectively frozen for 19 months rarely gets acted on the moment it opens. This one did, and the first thing we found was a bug that had been quietly costing the business real listings for months.
23 Services Listed, Up From 6
An earlier session had written 23 real services to the profile: cupcakes, macarons, cake pops, cookies, pies, pastries, dessert tables, charcuterie, and more. Only 6 survived. 17 vanished with no error returned by Google's API, and an earlier diagnosis blamed a total write failure caused by a separate bug in our own reporting code.
The real cause was narrower and easy to miss: Google silently drops a free-form service item unless its declared category is genuinely one of the profile's own live categories. One of the 17 items carried a category ID that did not exist on this profile. Fixed that one tag, resent all 17, and every one landed.
We did not take that on faith. We confirmed the same mechanism independently by adding 20 new services with matching categories to a second, unrelated local business client's profile. All 20 landed cleanly, which is what told us the fix was the actual mechanism and not a coincidence.
Which of these we can prove, and which we are told. 23 services now listed, 6 before the fix, 17 recovered, and 20 confirmed on a second client's profile are all read directly from the Business Profile API. This is an input metric, not an outcome: it proves the listing is now complete and accurate, not that it has changed a ranking or a call count yet.
Three Real Inconsistencies Between the Profile and the Site
Business name
The profile's name didn't match the brand name used on the site, the domain, and the brand art everywhere else. Updated the profile to match the actual brand.
Hours, in three places
The profile's hours were already correct. The site had the wrong hours in the shared footer, a duplicated schema block on two pages, and the contact page's own visible text. All three fixed and reconfirmed live.
A retracted claim
An old scrape-based finding referenced a stale pricing figure. Checked against the live profile: it does not exist there. Retracted rather than "fixed," since there was nothing to fix.
Left open on purpose
Saturday hours are unresolved: the profile publishes none, the site says "by appointment." That needs the owner's own answer, not a guess in either direction.
A Blog Post Rebuilt Around Real Specifics
The client sent a wedding-cake-tasting draft, already AI-assisted, and asked that it be reviewed before it went up. We humanized the prose, cut the AI phrasing tells, and found it repeated ground an existing published post on wedding charcuterie already covered, so we trimmed it to a pointer with an internal link instead of two competing pages.
The bigger problem surfaced on a second pass: the draft was generic enough to belong to any bakery in the country. We rewrote it anchored in specifics pulled from the client's own published pages: real flavor combinations, the actual booking lead time and its Saturday-first-booked pattern, a real guest-count ceiling, and the physical fact that buttercream softens in summer heat, so a July wedding and an October wedding are different jobs. Every fact traced back to something the client had already published; nothing invented.
We published it live, not just drafted, so the client could review it immediately without a login. Two more defects turned up on that same publish pass: the post had the wrong author and the wrong category. Both fixed and reconfirmed by reloading the live page, not by trusting the API's response.
On the testimonial. The client responded to this work directly and warmly. We're holding the exact quote and her name out of this page until she gives explicit sign-off for public use, separate from her having already reviewed the work itself.
The Results
Everything below is read from the Business Profile API or reconfirmed on the live site this week. Search-performance data is in the October 2026 update below, with no before-baseline, stated plainly rather than implied around.
19 Months to Verified
A verification ticket pending since February 2025 cleared this week, fully verified with no restriction on any field checked
23 Services, Up From 6
17 services silently dropped by a Google API quirk, root-caused, and recovered. Confirmed on a second client's profile before calling it fixed
Three Hours Listings Corrected
Footer, duplicated schema, and visible contact-page text all disagreed with the correct profile hours. Found by a second review pass, fixed and reconfirmed live
One Stale Claim Retracted
An old pricing figure did not exist on the live profile. Retracted instead of quietly left standing
One Post Rewritten, Not Just Edited
Generic AI-assisted draft replaced with specifics traced to the client's own published pages, plus two publish-pass defects fixed
Search Results: See the Update Below
Search Console numbers for September and October 2026 are in the update below, compared across two windows because no earlier baseline exists
Update, October 2026
Figures below come from Google Search Console, pulled October 9, 2026. Search Console has data for the bakery's domain only from September 1, 2026, so there is no before-baseline and nothing here shows a change from the old Airo site. What it does show is two equal windows from the start of the project: September 1 to 18, which covers the first days of the move, against September 20 to October 7.
Keywords Shown For: 170 to 225
The number of keywords the site shows for in Google, first window against second
Top 10 Keywords: 77 to 137
Keywords where the site appears in Google's top 10
Average Position 11.2 to 9.3
Impressions went from 1,443 to 1,696 across the same two windows
Clicks Steady, 98 to 103
About 5.7 a day in the later window. Clicks held roughly steady; the visible change is in how many searches the site now appears for
Local Searches That Grew
The searches that gained the most impressions include "custom cakes near me", "cupcakes near me", "cake pops near me" and "birthday cakes near me"
