Your Maps listing is your Google Business Profile

The pin, the opening hours, the reviews and the call button all come from a Google Business Profile. It is free, run by Google, and separate from your website.

Search your business name on Google Maps before creating anything, because a listing may already exist. If it’s there and unclaimed, you’ll see an option to claim it. If someone else manages it, perhaps a former employee or an old web designer, you can request ownership from them rather than starting again. Google’s help page on adding or claiming a Business Profile walks through both routes.

Decide whether customers come to you

This is the first real choice, and in London it trips people up more than anything else.

  • Customers visit you, as with a clinic, salon, shop or an office where you meet clients: show your address.
  • You go to customers, as most trades and mobile services do: you are a service-area business. Google says to remove your address from the profile if you don’t serve customers there, and to set the areas you cover instead.
  • Both: keep the address and add service areas.

The London trap is the virtual office. Plenty of small firms use a registered office or mail-forwarding address in central London. Google’s Business Profile guidelines say an address you rent but don’t operate from isn’t eligible, and neither is a PO box. Use the real address you work from, and hide it if customers don’t visit.

Verify it, then fill in everything

Google has to verify the business before the profile goes live and your edits take effect, and it decides which verification methods to offer you. Once you’re in, fill in every field. Google’s own help says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up in local results.

  • Name: your real business name, as it appears on your van, sign or website. The guidelines don’t allow extra keywords or places in the name, so “Smith Plumbing”, not “Smith Plumbing Emergency Plumber Hackney”.
  • Primary category: the one that best describes the business. Look at what the businesses already showing for your main search have chosen.
  • Service areas: Google allows up to 20, set by town, postcode or area, and suggests the whole area shouldn’t stretch beyond about two hours’ drive from your base. Its page on managing service areas has the detail.
  • Opening hours, including bank holidays, kept up to date.
  • Your phone number and a link to your website.
  • Photos of real work, your premises or van and the people customers will meet, rather than stock images.

What Google says decides who shows up

Google publishes three factors in its help page on improving your local ranking:

  • Relevance: how well a profile matches what someone searched for.
  • Distance: how far the business is from the person searching.
  • Prominence: how well known the business is. Google says this draws on things like how many websites link to you and how many reviews you have.

The same page says there’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.

Distance is the one you can’t change, and London is dense. Someone searching in Camden has a long list of nearby options before a business based in Croydon, however good its profile. Set service areas you would genuinely travel to, and put your effort into relevance and prominence, which you can influence.

Ask every customer for a review, the same way

Google’s ranking help says more reviews and positive ratings can help, and that replying to reviews shows you value the feedback. Its content policy for Maps also sets firm limits on how you ask:

  • You can ask customers to review you.
  • You can’t offer anything in return, such as a discount or a freebie.
  • You can’t pick out only the happy customers to ask.

So the approach that’s allowed is also the simplest: ask every customer when the job or appointment is done, with a direct link, and one reminder at most. Reply to reviews, good and bad, in a line or two.

Asking everyone, every time, is the kind of task that drops off a busy week. It is why we built automated review requests that go out after each finished job.

Your website does the other half

The profile sends people to your website, and the website is where they decide. It should say plainly what you do and where: a page for each main service, the areas you cover, and a business name and phone number that match the profile exactly.

Mismatches, like an old number on the site or a different trading name on the profile, leave people unsure they’ve found the right business. Keep the two identical, and update both on the same day when anything changes. Getting found and turning that into enquiries is the whole of our Websites work.

A checklist before you move on

  • Search Maps for your business and claim or request the existing listing.
  • Choose storefront, service-area or both, and never list a virtual office.
  • Verify, then complete every field, starting with your real name and primary category.
  • Set service areas you’d actually travel to.
  • Ask every finished customer for a review, with no incentive, and reply to what comes in.
  • Make your website and profile say the same thing.