Attributes Most Businesses Never Set

What attributes are

A set of factual statements about your business that appear on the listing as small labels: wheelchair accessible entrance, free parking, appointment required, accepts card payments, and so on.

They differ by category, so a restaurant sees a different set from a plumber.

Most businesses set a handful when the listing was created, or none at all, and never look again as new ones are added.

Which matters because they do two jobs, and the second is the one people do not realise.

They are filters, not decoration

The important point, and it changes how seriously to take a set of checkboxes.

Customers filter local results by these: open now, wheelchair accessible, offers delivery, has parking.

A business that has not set an attribute is not shown as unknown, it is simply absent from results filtered on it, which is functionally the same as answering no.

So a shop with a step-free entrance that has never ticked the box is invisible to anybody filtering for one, and the shop next door with the same entrance and a tick is not.

That is not a ranking effect and it is a total exclusion from a specific set of searches, which is worse.

The ones worth setting first

• Accessibility: entrance, parking, toilet, seating.
• Payment: which methods you actually take.
• Service options: in store, delivery, on site, appointment.
• Parking, which people genuinely filter on.
• Amenities relevant to your category.
• Health and safety measures, where applicable.

The first group does the most work and is the most often blank, partly because owners assume the attribute means something more formal than it does.

Accessibility attributes deserve care

Worth a section of their own, in both directions.

For a customer who uses a wheelchair, a rollator, or a pushchair, this information determines whether a visit is possible, and finding out on arrival that it is not is a genuinely bad experience you caused.

So setting them accurately is a service rather than a marketing tactic.

Which also means not overstating. A step-free entrance means step-free, not one small step. An accessible toilet means one built as such, not a standard cubicle with space beside it.

Where you are unsure, go and look, measure the doorway, and answer honestly.

A business that ticks these optimistically is generating a wasted journey for the person who most needed the information to be right.

A worked example

A shop with a level entrance, an accessible toilet, and a parking bay outside had none of those attributes set.

They had been open four years and the listing had been created by a former employee in about ten minutes.

Setting the attributes took under fifteen minutes, and involved walking round the shop with a phone to answer honestly rather than guessing.

Two of them turned out not to apply: the toilet was not built to an accessible standard and one payment method had been discontinued.

Over the following months several customers mentioned finding them through a filtered search, which had not happened before.

The owner's remark was that the shop had been accessible for four years and had been telling nobody.

Review them, because the list grows

The reason this is not a one-off task.

New attributes are added regularly as categories evolve and as circumstances change, and a listing set up two years ago will have blanks that did not exist then.

Recent additions across many categories have covered service and safety arrangements that were not previously relevant to anybody.

Look at the full set once or twice a year rather than assuming yours is complete, and expect to find several new ones each time.

Attach it to another annual check so it happens without a separate reminder.

Be honest about the marginal ones

A judgement that comes up on almost every set.

The temptation is to tick anything arguably true, on the reasoning that more attributes means more filters you appear in.

The cost of that is a customer arriving expecting something you do not have, which produces a poor review and a wasted journey.

For attributes describing the physical premises, the standard should be whether somebody relying on it would be satisfied on arrival.

For softer ones, such as amenities, a reasonable interpretation is fine.

The distinction is whether being wrong costs somebody a wasted trip, and where it does, be strict.

Some are set by customers

Worth knowing so an unexpected attribute is not a mystery.

Certain attributes can be contributed or inferred rather than set by the owner, based on customer answers to prompts they receive after visiting.

That is generally helpful and it means an attribute can appear that you did not set, and occasionally one that is wrong.

Check the full set when you review the listing, including ones you do not remember setting.

Where something is wrong, correct it and check again a few weeks later, since a customer-contributed value can reassert itself.

They appear in the results, not just the listing

A detail worth knowing because it changes how visible these are.

Several attributes surface as small labels within local results themselves, next to the rating and the category, rather than only on the full listing.

Which means somebody scanning three businesses sees them without opening anything, and a label saying wheelchair accessible or on-site services is doing work at the point of comparison.

You do not control which ones display, and setting them accurately is the only way to be eligible.

It also means an incorrect attribute is visible to more people than you would assume, which is another argument for walking the premises rather than guessing.

The counter-case

Attributes are worth ten minutes and they are not a growth strategy.

The volume of people using filters is real and modest, so a business expecting a transformation from setting checkboxes will be disappointed.

They matter most for retail, hospitality, and anywhere customers physically attend, and considerably less for a service business that travels to people and has no premises to describe.

There is also a category of attribute that is simply not worth the deliberation it attracts, and a business spending an afternoon debating two ambiguous ones has misallocated the effort.

Set the accurate ones quickly, be strict on anything physical, and spend the remaining attention on photographs and reviews.

The ten minutes

1. Open the full attribute list for your category.
2. Walk the premises rather than guessing.
3. Set accessibility attributes accurately.
4. Confirm payment methods are current.
5. Set service options that genuinely apply.
6. Leave anything marginal unset if it is physical.
7. Review the whole list annually.

Step two is the difference between this being useful and being a source of wasted journeys.

What decides local results is covered in the map pack and what gets you into it.

Frequently asked questions

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