Taking over a client's listings when nobody knows the passwords

Every agency onboarding has the same moment. You ask for access to the Google Business Profile and the client says: "I think the last guy set that up."

The last guy left in 2022. The email address he used doesn't exist. Nobody knows which of three Gmail accounts owns it.

This is normal, it's solvable, and it's worth doing properly before you touch anything else — because the alternative is creating a second listing and causing the most expensive problem in local SEO.

First: find out what exists

Before requesting access to anything, work out what there is. Search the phone number in quotes, the address in quotes, and the business name excluding their own domain. You're building an inventory, and you'll frequently find listings the client has forgotten or never knew about.

The free ways of finding existing listings cover the technique. Do this first — requesting ownership of one profile while a second sits unclaimed is how you end up managing half a presence.

Google Business Profile: request ownership

Google has a formal process and it works, but it takes time.

1. Search the business on Google, open the profile, and click Claim this business or Own this business?
2. Google will tell you the profile is already managed and offer to request access. Submit it.
3. The current owner gets an email. They have seven days to respond.
4. If they don't respond, you can usually claim it after that window — sometimes immediately, sometimes with additional verification.

Three things worth knowing:

Use the client's account, not yours. Request ownership into an email the client controls, then have them add you as a manager. If you use your own agency account, you've recreated the exact problem you're solving — in three years someone will be reading this article about you.

The seven days are real. There's no way to accelerate it, and support won't override it. Start on day one of the engagement, not the week before a campaign launches.

If the current owner is a former agency, they may respond and refuse. At that point the escalation is Google Business Profile support with proof of ownership — business licence, utility bill, signage photos. It's slow but it does resolve, because Google's position is that the business owns the listing, not whoever created it.

Yelp: claim it, then argue

Yelp's version is simpler because pages exist whether or not anyone claimed them.

Go to biz.yelp.com, search for the business, and claim it. Verification is usually a phone call to the listed number — which is why this fails if the phone number on the listing is wrong. Fix the number first through "suggest an edit", wait for it to take, then claim.

If someone else has claimed it, contact Yelp support. Expect a few days.

Facebook: the hardest one

Facebook is the worst of the three, because pages are attached to personal profiles and personal profiles belong to people who have left.

If someone at the client still has admin, it's easy: Page settings → Page roles → add you.

If nobody does, Facebook's business verification route requires proving the business owns the page — documents, and patience. Their support is the least responsive of the majors.

A pragmatic middle path exists that nobody likes: if the page has few followers and little content, it can be cheaper to create a new one properly and leave the old one to rot. That contradicts everything about avoiding duplicates, so only do it when the old page is genuinely inactive — and try to get it deleted afterwards.

Everything else

Smaller directories are usually easy. Most have a "claim this listing" flow verified by phone or email at the listed contact.

For the ones that don't, email support with the business details and a clear statement that you're the authorised representative. Response rates are surprisingly good — these sites want accurate data.

Then write it all down

The reason this happens is that nobody kept a record. Not of the logins — of the listings. Which platforms the business is on, which account owns each one, and which are verified.

Then check it twice a year, because the listings you just fought to recover will drift again.

That document is worth more to the next agency than anything else you'll hand over. It's also worth more to you in year two, when the person who did this onboarding has moved on and it's your turn to be the last guy.

Placemark keeps that list per client — every listing, its URL, and whether it's live — so an onboarding starts with an inventory instead of a search. Free for one business.