Claiming Your Google My Business Listing

What the listing actually is

The panel that appears beside search results when somebody searches for your business, and the pin that shows on the map when they search for your trade nearby.

It carries your name, address, phone number, hours, category, photographs, reviews and a link to your site.

For a business people search for by category and location, it is frequently the first thing they see and sometimes the only thing they need. Plenty of enquiries come from somebody tapping the call button without ever reaching the website.

Why it matters more than it seems

Because local searches are answered differently from other searches.

Somebody searching for a plumber in their town gets a map with three businesses on it before the ordinary results begin. Those three positions attract a large share of the attention.

Being in that group is decided partly by things you cannot control, such as how close you are to the person searching. It is also decided by things you can, and a complete verified listing is most of them.

A business with no listing is absent from that part of the page entirely, regardless of how good its website is.

It may already exist

An important first step, because creating a duplicate is the most common mistake.

Listings are generated from other sources, and yours may have been created without your involvement. It may have wrong hours, an old address, or a phone number that belonged to a previous occupant.

Search for your business name and town before creating anything. If a panel appears, the listing exists and you are claiming it rather than making it.

If two already exist, which happens after a move or a rename, they need merging rather than one being ignored.

Verifying it

The step people abandon.

Verification proves you are the business. Usually that means a card posted to the address with a code on it, which takes a couple of weeks to arrive.

Some businesses can verify by phone or email, and some by video. Which options you get is decided by the category and the situation rather than by choice.

The card is the common case and the delay is the reason listings sit half-finished. Order it, note it in the calendar, and complete the setup when it arrives.

Do not change the address while waiting, and make sure whoever collects the post knows to look for it.

Filling it in completely

1. The exact business name, as you actually trade, without added keywords.
2. Primary category, chosen carefully, plus secondary ones.
3. Hours, including any that differ on Saturdays.
4. Phone number, the one that reaches you rather than a tracked line you might change.
5. Website address, pointing at the most relevant page rather than always the homepage.
6. Description, written for a person rather than stuffed with services.
7. Photographs, which do more work than the text.
8. Attributes, the checkboxes for parking, accessibility and payment methods.

The first has a rule worth respecting. Adding your town or your trade to the name field is against the guidelines and businesses do get corrected for it, sometimes losing the listing temporarily.

A worked example

A locksmith who had a website and no listing.

His site ranked reasonably for his town, and his phone was quiet. Searching his own trade plus the town, the map showed three competitors and he was nowhere on it.

He claimed the listing, verified by card two weeks later, and spent an hour completing it: categories, hours, twenty photographs of actual jobs, and the emergency call-out attribute.

Within about six weeks he was appearing in the map results for searches he had never appeared in, and the calls arriving were different in kind. People were tapping the number directly rather than reading the site.

Total cost: nothing, plus an hour and a fortnight of waiting for a postcard.

That is not typical of everything in marketing, which is why this is the first thing worth doing.

Keeping it current

The part that separates a listing that works from one that existed.

Hours matter more than anything else, because they are what people check before travelling. Wrong hours over a long weekend produce a wasted journey and occasionally a review about it.

Photographs benefit from being added periodically rather than once. A listing with recent pictures reads as an operating business.

And the listing accepts questions from the public, which anybody can answer, including people who do not work for you. Those need watching.

The posts and messages nobody uses

Two features that come with the listing and sit untouched on most of them.

Posts are short updates that appear on the listing itself. A seasonal note, an offer, a change to hours over a holiday. They expire after a week or so, which is why they suit announcements rather than permanent information.

Messaging lets somebody contact you directly from the listing. Useful if you will answer promptly, and actively harmful if you will not, because an unanswered message is visible to the person who sent it.

Turn messaging on only if somebody is watching it. Everything else on the listing works whether or not you are looking; that one does not.

What it will not do

Being honest about the limits.

It will not rank you in a town you are nowhere near, because proximity is a genuine factor and not one you can argue with.

It will not replace a website. It cannot hold your prices, explain a service properly, or take an enquiry in your own form.

And it is somebody else's platform, subject to their rules, with support that is difficult to reach. Which is an argument for having both rather than choosing.

The hour to spend this week

If the listing is unclaimed, claim it. If it is claimed and half-finished, finish it.

For most local trades this is the highest return available for an hour of work, and it costs nothing but the time.

The reason it gets skipped is that it feels administrative rather than like marketing. It is administrative, and it is also where a substantial share of local enquiries begin.

How the listing relates to a site you actually control is covered in when a Facebook page is not enough.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.