Managing Your Listing Without the Old Dashboard

The shift, in one line

You no longer go to a separate place to manage the listing. You go to where the listing already is, and edit it there.

That sounds like a small distinction and it changes the habit completely, because the dashboard was somewhere you had to remember and the listing is somewhere you can check in five seconds.

The main cost is that everything is in a different place than it was, and a routine built over years has to be relearned.

The controls are almost all still there. This is about where to find them.

The two ways in

Both require being signed in with the account that owns or manages the listing, which is the first thing to check if nothing appears.

Search your own business name. If you have access, the editing controls appear alongside your listing rather than the ordinary public view.

Or search the phrase my business, which takes you to the same place without needing to type the business name, and is the faster route once you are used to it.

Either works on a computer or a phone, and both work in Maps as well as in Search.

If neither shows controls, you are either signed into the wrong account or you do not have access to that listing, and those are different problems.

Where the common settings went

• Hours and special hours: behind the edit controls.
• Photographs: an add photos control on the listing.
• Posts: a promote or add update control.
• Reviews and replies: a reviews control.
• Messages and questions: alongside reviews.
• Services, description and attributes: in the profile editor.

The wording of individual buttons has changed and continues to change, so learn the shape of it rather than memorising labels.

Set the holiday hours while you are there

The practical reason to do this now rather than in December.

Special hours are the most valuable thing on the listing at this time of year, and they are the item most likely to be forgotten in the confusion of a moved interface.

Find the hours control, look for the option covering upcoming holidays, and enter every date for the next twelve months in one sitting.

That removes the task from your year and means a moved button cannot cause you to be shown as closed when you are open.

If you learn one control in the new arrangement, make it this one.

A worked example

A business had one person who updated the listing, always through the app, always the same way.

When the change was announced she spent fifteen minutes finding each control she used regularly: hours, photographs, posts, and replies to reviews.

She wrote down where each was, in four lines, and put it in the shared drive with their other operating notes.

The second administrator then followed the same four lines and confirmed they worked from his account.

Nothing was difficult and none of it needed doing twice.

The part that mattered was writing it down, because the person who would need it in six months was not the person who had worked it out.

On a phone

Worth a separate paragraph, since most small business owners update listings from a phone.

The same routes work: signed in, search your business name or the phrase my business, in the browser or in Maps.

The separate application still works for now and is going away next year, so it is worth using the new route deliberately rather than reaching for the app out of habit.

Adding photographs from a phone remains the fastest thing you can do for a listing, and that is unaffected by any of this.

If your habit was photographing a finished job and uploading it before leaving, keep that habit and change only where you tap.

Several locations

A different answer, and it is worth being clear which side you are on.

Businesses with more than a handful of locations continue to have a web dashboard, where bulk edits, user management, and location groups are practical in a way they are not in Search.

Editing twenty locations one at a time through Search is not a workflow anybody wants.

If you manage listings for clients, that dashboard remains the working environment, and the in-place editing is aimed at owners rather than at agencies.

For two or three locations either approach works, and most people find the dashboard easier for comparing them side by side.

Check who can actually get in

A useful thing to establish while you are relearning the route.

Confirm that more than one person has owner or manager access, from separate accounts, because a listing reachable by only one person is a problem waiting for a holiday or a departure.

Check that the people listed are people who still work with you, and remove anybody who does not.

And note which account holds primary ownership, since that is the one that matters if access ever has to be recovered.

This is the same check worth doing annually, and a moved interface is a reasonable prompt for it.

The counter-case

Not everything about the change is an improvement.

The old dashboard put every setting in one place, which suited anybody doing a thorough review, and in-place editing is better for quick changes and worse for working through everything systematically.

Interface wording is also still settling, so instructions written today may not match what you see in six months, which is an argument for learning the shape rather than the labels.

And for anybody managing listings professionally, a familiar workflow is being replaced on somebody else's schedule, which is a genuine cost with no compensating benefit.

The practical response is the same either way: find the controls once, write down where they are, and get on with the work that actually moves the listing.

Getting oriented

1. Sign in with the account that manages the listing.
2. Search your business name or the phrase my business.
3. Find the four controls you use most.
4. Write down where each is, in four lines.
5. Have a second person follow those lines.
6. Set the next twelve months of special hours.
7. Confirm who has access and remove anybody stale.

Step four is what makes this worth doing once rather than three times, and it takes two minutes.

The rename itself is covered in your listing changed its name this month.

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.