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Google Business / Google Maps

Google Business is basically Google's term for your listing on Google Maps, which also appears in local search results. Google give a lot of priority to Maps / Business listings.

Fancy watching a walkthrough instead? Click here to watch it.

For example, I searched for the word "plumber" and, after a kinda rubbish AI overview about what plumber is, some adverts, and links to search Checkatrade, Trustpilot, or Yell, the next biggest thing in the results is a list of businesses taken from Google Business.

You sometimes have to scroll quite far down the page to find the "organic" search results.

The businesses it lists are all local to me in North Manchester. Google knows I'm in Prestwich, in Manchester, without me having mentioned it in my search query.

Getting a Google Business listing is pretty straightforward. Verifying can be pretty time consuming, but it's nothing too tricky. And as long as your details are accurate, you shouldn't have any huge problems. So, let's get stuck in!

Google Business Profile Setup

So to sign up for Google business, just like any other Google product, you're going to need a Google account. You've probably got a Google account, because you'll need one for YouTube, for an Android phone, for using Google Maps, or for using any Google services. If you haven't got one, you should probably get one - you'll also need one for Google Search Console, which I cover in my other guide.

So once you've got your Google account, you'll go to business.google.com. And it says "Stand out on Google with a free business profile", and then we'll click the big "Get Started" button.

Once you're signed in, you'll search for your business name and category.

Google will ask me some questions / give you some tasks, like:

  • Do we have a location that people can visit?
  • What are your contact details?
  • What is your physical address?
  • Describe your business
  • Upload some photos

Google will ask you to sign up for Google ads - you should skip this, probably. It's a bit of a rabbithole to go down to immediately start making advertisements for your business.

It'll also ask you if you want to create a Google Workspace account, which is Google's paid web hosting and email address system. You don't need to do this, so you can click "Skip".

Verifying Your Listing

None of these steps will be too complicated or technical, although as I mentioned before it can be a bit of a pain to get "verified". There are a few ways that your business can be verified - Google will use an algorithm to decide which it's going to use for your business. I would imagine that this will take into account things like Companies House records, or Google's existing idea of where your business is and its location.

In the worst case, they can send you a postcard in the post, and the postcard will contain a code that you need to enter to verify your address, which can take a few days, but otherwise it'll should be just a day or two maximum to verify your business. And it might even be immediate - I'm not too experienced with the verification process to be fair.

Filling Out Your Profile

The first link on the Google Business page is to edit the details about your business - your business name, your category, your description, opening date, contact details, website address, all that sort of stuff. You should fill in as much of this as you possibly can.

You should especially make sure that your Service Areas are filled in because this tells Google directly which locations your customers are in. And if you've got opening hours that matter, then you should fill in the opening hours section too. There's tons of details that you can fill in here that will apply to different types of businesses.

If you run a restaurant, a cafe, or any type of shop, there's a whole bunch of details that you could fill in about the various ways that your business operates.

Reading and Replying to Reviews

Next up, we've got read reviews where you can see the reviews that people have left on your business. It can be quite a nice touch to reply to your reviews, and you should especially reply if you get a negative review and you think that it's unfounded because I think it's worth raising that in your Google business listing.

Photos

You can upload photos to show off your business. Make sure to upload at least your logo and a "Cover" photo, which will show in the header box on your listing profile. You might want to upload some examples of work that you've done, because that's what people who are searching for your business will be looking for. And you could upload a photo of yourself or your team, if you've got a smart one.

Listings that have got photos look better than listings that don't have photos!

Performance

Next we've got performance, which tells you some details about how your business is doing on Google. For me, honestly - it's not great. 44 clicks, 39 clicks, 66 clicks in January I suppose that's better. But not a lot of clicks every month. Hopefully yours will do better and hopefully mine will pick up. I haven't really thought too much about advertising locally and I should really get on that.

It also shows the search terms that showed your business profile. For me, it's mostly people searching for "Chobble", and a few searching for "web design Prestwich".

Products

This section lets you list products that will appear in Google search and on Maps. I'm not actually sure how these products look, so I'm going to get back to you and let you know once I've dug into that.

Services

You can list the various services that your company provides. You want to make sure that everything that you do is covered in here. Google lets you add more services and then you can add a custom service if Google isn't suggesting one that exactly matches what you're after.

Bookings

If you've got a booking system, you can add a link to it here, which will allow customers to book directly through it. You can also just link it to your "contact" page if you haven't got a booking system.

Questions & Answers

Visitors or you can ask questions of the business and then you can leave a response as the answer - and visitors can even leave a response. You can use this to answer common questions like pricing, services, or opening hours before customers even visit your website.

If you've got questions that you commonly get asked or that you think are worth telling your visitors about upfront before they even click through to your website, the Q&A section is the place to do that.

Add updates

We can post updates that'll appear as kind of mini blog posts within Google Maps. It's hard to remember to post updates to your Google Maps listing, because who's logging into Google Maps on the regular? But, if you can remember when you do something substantial with your business, it would be nice to log in post something about your business.

You might post about a new service that you've got, or a new product that you're selling, or some update to your terms and conditions - or anything really. It's another little signal for any visitors who see your Google maps listing that your business is active and up to date.

I know it can feel sometimes like there's a million places to keep up to date - and there kinda is. Sorry about that!

Ask For Reviews

This page gives you a little code that you can give to someone that'll immediately take them through to the place where they can leave a review for your business. Bizarrely, it lets me leave a review for my own business - five stars! You can also share a QR code here that'll link people straight through to your Google Maps listing for them to leave a review.

Conclusion

So that's an overview of your Google business profile. I think the main things that are important here are to try and encourage some people to leave you some reviews, because just one or two reviews looks a lot better than none, and to make sure that your details on there are filled out as best as you're reasonably able to do.

It would be a huge amount of work to copy all of your products onto Google Maps, to copy every single one of your images over, and to keep it entirely up to date with what your website says, and I think that would probably be a bit unreasonable to do.

But keeping it somewhat up to date is worthwhile, and trying to get people to leave a review is definitely worthwhile. Speaking of which - if anyone fancies leaving me a review I'd really appreciate it. I could always do with more!

It's worth me mentioning Bing places as well, which is at BingPlaces.com, which is the Bing search engine equivalent of Google Business. You can actually import your Google Business listing straight over to Bing. Admittedly, hardly anyone is searching on Bing.. But some people are, so it's worth having your business show up on both.

I hope that's a good overview of how Google business works. Hopefully it's all very straightforward. Google will try and make this very easy for you to do.

One question people have about Google Business listings is whether they have to show their home address. And, you don't have to - you can un-tick a box that says "Show Business Address To Customers", and it won't show the address.

But, you then won't show up in maps listing in the maps listing quite as often, so this is your call. I've taken the view that it's probably worth my address showing up for the sake of showing up a bit more often. Whether that's accurate, I don't really know.

If you want assistance setting up or optimising your Google Business listing, get in touch.