Timed to coincide with a local search session at SMX East, Greg Sterling posted a Q&A about Google Maps and local businesses on Search Engine Land today. If you’re a small business owner with questions/concerns about your local business listing in Google Maps, I’m guessing this Q&A will have some helpful, interesting information.

One of the questions that Google’s Eric Stein answers is about how to handle situations when one small business purchases or merges with another:

Q: How do you handle mergers? We purchase/manage many facilities and need to change their name and contact info. But the third party sources make changing the name almost impossible. We were told by one third party submission company that we had to pay them to change the company name and if we stopped paying the monthly fee they would switch back all our data to the old inaccurate data. In the end if we don’t pay the information is not correct and the users get less relevant results.

Google: You should claim the old listing in Local Business Center, by finding the listing on Maps, clicking More Info, Edit, then Claim Your Business. Then, once you’ve claimed the business, update the name and contact info.

If you can verify neither the old/acquired business’s address nor phone number, then you should create a new listing with the new info, again using LBC. If the old listing continues to show alongside your new one and you can’t claim/verify it, you can click More Info, then Edit, then Remove Place to flag the old listing for deletion.

The whole Q&A is very detailed like that. Definitely worth five minutes of your time.