Why does my law firm have two Google Business Profiles?

Because somebody made one, once, for a good reason, and nobody ever took it down. That is nearly always the whole story.

Every utility company has a story about the house with two accounts on it. The payments go to one, the overdue notice comes from the other, and the customer spends a year certain that somebody at the company is incompetent when what actually happened is that one clerk opened a second account during a renovation in 2018. That clerk did a sensible thing on a Tuesday, and the system has no reason to notice that both records describe one house.

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Google works the same way, and a law firm is unusually good at generating the second record.

The five ways a second listing appears

An attorney left. Individual lawyers can legitimately have their own listing at the firm's address. When that lawyer moves on, the listing stays put with your address and your main number on it, and it is now a separate business in Google's eyes, competing with yours for the same searches.

The office moved. Somebody created a new listing at the new address instead of editing the old one. The old listing keeps the years of history and the reviews, and keeps ranking for a neighborhood you left.

A vendor built one. A past marketing engagement created a profile on an account nobody at the firm can access. This is the version that turns up most often, and the firm usually has no idea the second profile exists until somebody searches properly.

The firm changed its name. Partner departures, mergers and rebrands all tend to produce a fresh listing rather than an edit to the old one.

Somebody was helpful. Google can generate a listing from public data, and members of the public can suggest a business exists. A well-meaning former client who could not find you has started more than one duplicate.

Finding all of them, properly

Ten minutes with a notepad finds most of it. Search the firm name in Google Maps. Search the previous firm name if there was one. Search every address the practice has ever occupied. Search each attorney's full name plus your city, including anyone who has left in the past five years. Search the old phone number as a plain search, in quotes.

Then check inside the account: the Business Profile manager will list every profile the signed-in account controls, and it is worth checking whether anyone else at the firm is signed into a different one. Finally, if a marketing company worked on the firm at any point, ask them directly what they created and under which account. They usually still know.

Write down what each listing has on it: the address, the phone, the review count, whether it says verified, and the date of the oldest review. That last one matters more than it looks.

Merging without losing eleven years of reviews

Here is where firms lose things they cannot get back, so it is worth being slow.

The profile you want to survive is almost always the one with the reviews and the oldest history, even if its address is wrong and its name is out of date. Addresses and names can be edited. A review is somebody else's writing on somebody else's account, and there is no support ticket that recreates it.

So the order is: claim and verify the profile that holds the reviews first, correct it to the current address, name, suite and phone, and only then deal with the other one. The tempting order, cleaning up the newer profile you already have access to and marking the old one closed, is the one that quietly costs you the reviews.

Two mechanisms exist for the second listing. If you control both, the profile manager can flag one as a duplicate. If you do not control it, "Suggest an edit" on the public listing lets you report it as a duplicate of another business. Both run on Google's own clock, which is days to a few weeks rather than minutes.

One thing to avoid: do not mark a duplicate as permanently closed as a shortcut. Closed listings keep appearing in search results with the word closed on them, and a law firm showing up in Maps as permanently closed does more damage in a week than the duplicate did in a year.

Getting access back when nobody has the password

This is a real process rather than a phone call. Google lets you request ownership of a profile somebody else controls: you ask, the current owner gets a notification and has a window to respond, and if they do not respond you can generally take it over. It takes days. Start it early in a cleanup rather than late, because everything else waits on it.

If the current owner is a former employee who is still reachable and on good terms, one email asking them to transfer ownership is faster than the entire formal process. It is worth trying first.

After the merge

Expect the results to look strange for a couple of weeks. Reviews can take time to appear on the surviving profile, the map pin may sit in the wrong spot for a while, and a heavily edited profile sometimes gets pushed back into re-verification, which is inconvenient rather than a punishment. Resist the urge to keep editing during that window. Rapid repeated changes to a listing are one of the reliable ways to attract a suspension.

Then go back to the directories. A duplicate on Google is usually the visible end of a longer problem, because the same wrong address and old phone number are sitting in the bar directory, on Avvo, on Justia, on FindLaw and on Martindale, and those feed back into what Google believes about you. Cleaning Google without cleaning the sources means doing it again next year.

Where this fits

For a two-to-five attorney practice, duplicates are usually a symptom of growth rather than neglect, and they travel with a handful of related problems. That whole situation, and what I do about it, is on the small firm page. If you are a solo who set up both a firm listing and a personal one because an article told you to, the solo practitioner page covers why Google specifically asks you not to.

If you would rather not spend a couple of weeks on merge screens, the three fixed-price sizes are on the homepage, or email hello@divorceseo.com with your firm name and I will tell you how many listings I can find.