How Do I Get My Business on Google Maps?

If you do local work, the map is where most of it starts. Somebody types your trade and their town, Google shows three businesses on a map, and almost nobody scrolls past them.

Getting in there is free. Here is how.

How do you actually get on the map?

Three steps, and only one of them is slow.

1. Create or claim the profile. Google calls it a Business Profile. Search your business name first, because there is a decent chance a profile already exists that somebody created automatically, and you want to claim that one rather than make a duplicate.
2. Verify it. Google needs to know you are really you. For trades this is often a short video showing your van, your tools and your paperwork. It can take days.
3. Fill it in properly. This is the bit that decides whether it does anything.

Steps one and two get you listed. Step three is the whole job.

Getting through verification first time

Video verification catches people out, and a failed attempt costs you another week.

Have it ready before you start: the van with the signwriting visible, your tools, something with the business name on it such as an invoice book or a letter, and the street if you have premises. You will be asked to film continuously without cutting, so walk the route once before you record.

If a profile for your business already exists and somebody else has claimed it, which happens when a previous marketing company set it up, there is a process to request access. It is slow and it is worth starting immediately rather than creating a second profile, because duplicates cause worse problems than waiting does.

What does "filling it in properly" mean?

Most trade profiles I look at have a name, a phone number and nothing else. That is a listing. It is not a profile that wins anything.

What actually belongs on it:

• The right primary category. Plumber, not contractor. Electrician, not home services. Google leans on this heavily.
• Every service you offer, listed individually. Blocked drains, hot water cylinders, bathroom renovations, whatever you do. If it is not listed, you are not in the running when somebody searches for it.
• The areas you genuinely cover. Not every suburb within a two hour drive. The ones you would actually go to.
• Hours that are true. If you turn out at eleven at night, your profile should not say you shut at five.
• Photos of your own work. Not stock images. People are checking whether you are real.
• A link to the right page on your site. If the job has its own page, send them to it rather than your home page.

None of that is difficult. It is just nobody's favourite afternoon.

What decides which three businesses Google shows?

Google publishes this, which saves everyone guessing. Their explanation of how local results are ranked comes down to three things:

Distance. How close you are to whoever is searching. You cannot change this, and it is the honest reason one location will never own an entire city.

Relevance. How well your profile matches what they typed. This is the one people leave on the table. A profile that lists one category and nothing else loses every search beyond the obvious one.

Prominence. How well known you are. Reviews, mentions elsewhere on the web, and whether the rest of the internet agrees you exist.

The first of those is fixed. The other two are both things you could start on this afternoon, which is rare in search work and is why the profile is where I always begin.

What about reviews?

Reviews feed prominence, and they are also the thing a customer reads before ringing. Both matter.

Earning them is the easy half. The difficulty is asking in the moment, while the customer is stood in front of the finished job and pleased about it, rather than three days later when it has stopped feeling worth mentioning.

Toolbox Tribe has a review request and QR code builder that turns your Google review link into a code you can stick on the van or the back of an invoice, plus messages you can send without writing one from scratch. They have also written up how to actually get more reviews, which is worth ten minutes.

One warning: do not buy reviews and do not offer anything in exchange for one. Google's review policies prohibit it, and profiles do get stripped. It is a stupid risk for something you can earn honestly.

Keeping it alive

A profile is not a form you complete once. The ones that do well are the ones that look current.

Add photographs as you finish jobs, a few a month rather than forty in one go. Reply to every review. Update the hours before a public holiday rather than after. Add a service when you start offering it.

Ten minutes a month is enough, and it is ten minutes most of your competitors are not spending.

The mistakes I see most

• Profile set up once, four years ago, never touched since
• One category, no services listed
• Service area covering half the country
• Hours that say closed when you would happily take the call
• No photos, or photos from the website of whoever built your site
• Nobody replying to reviews, good or bad

Fix those and you have done more than most of your competitors have.

Where does this fit with everything else?

The profile is the single highest value thing most local trades can fix, and it costs nothing but an afternoon. It is also not the whole job. Once the map is sorted, the next question is whether you have a real page for each service worth having, which is where local SEO proper starts. If you are a plumber, that looks like this.

Start with the profile though. It is free, it is fast, and it is where your customers already are. The one decision worth getting right before you begin is whether you are a service area business or a shopfront, because getting that wrong is the most common reason a profile disappears later.