The survey can be accessed here and it clearly shows Google to see if they can charge for Google My Business listings and, if so, how much they could charge per month. Yes, Google My Business is free. In addition, Google considers it to be your company's official online profile. In addition, it extracts information from your profile while answering inquiries related to your profile.
The Google Guarantee badge is only available to companies that pass a selection and verification process through Local Services Ads or their partners. However, there are some digital marketing companies that will help you set up and manage your ad for a fee, as shown in the Google My Business pricing table on this page. If you want to learn how to optimize your own Google My Business profile so you don't have to pay fees for these types of services, check out my article on how to add keywords to Google My Business so that it ranks higher on search engine results pages (SERP) so that more customers find your company. As you can see, the price of managing Google My Business profiles may vary depending on the level of services you need.
As stated in that guide, “By linking your business profile and your smart campaigns, your ads show your company's address and link to your business profile or to Maps to reach your company. Of course, if Google were to add a fee to Google My Business, it would be a good source of revenue for Google. It helps you reach and interact with local customers through Google Search and Maps, while allowing Google to provide accurate local information to users. Your Google My Business listing and its quality have an important influence on your brand's visibility in local searches.
A Google My Business profile is an effective service that any company or organization can use to manage their online presence on Google for local SEO purposes. However, you can position yourself ahead of GMB's organic results if you promote your business through paid Google Map ads. You'll also get a Google My Business price list showing the average costs you can expect to pay a digital marketing company to manage your GMB profile on a monthly basis in order to attract more local customers to your store. You can read all the information about this transition in Google's announcement about the introduction of new updates to Google's business profile.
Creating a Google My Business profile and managing your business listing in Google Search and Maps is free to reach more customers online. That data used to be outdated or incorrect, so Google needed to fix this problem, so Google provided a method for companies to update their own information. You can also check out this Google Ads keyword match types page for information on the different matching strategies you can use in Google AdWords campaigns.
