Guide

How to claim your Google Business Profile

The map listing is free, most new owners never set one up, and for a business people search for locally it is worth more than a website. Here is the whole process, including the part that catches everyone out.

Six steps
About half an hour of your time
You will need your phone

Google charges nothing for this, ever. Not to create it, not to verify it, not to keep it.

Why this is worth an evening

When somebody nearby searches for what you do, most of what they tap is the map — not the web results underneath it.

That block of three businesses with the star ratings is not fed by websites. It is fed by Google Business Profiles, and if you do not have one you cannot appear in it at all.

For a business people find locally — cleaning, lawn care, grooming, detailing, handyman work — this is usually the highest-value free thing you can do after registering. It is also the one nobody tells you about, because there is nothing to sell you.

Get these together first

Ten minutes of gathering saves an hour of stopping and starting.

A Google account. A personal Gmail works. If you would rather keep business and personal separate, make a free one now and use it from the start — moving a profile between accounts later is fiddly.
Your business name exactly as it is registered. Not the short version you say on the phone.
Your phone number, and the towns or counties you actually take work in.
The web address of your booking page.
Your phone, for the verification video. Do not start somewhere you cannot film your van and your equipment — you may be asked on the spot.

Watch out

Use the registered name and nothing else. Adding your town or your service to it — “Smith Cleaning Greenville SC” when you are registered as “Smith Cleaning LLC” — is against Google’s rules and is one of the most common reasons a new profile is suspended. It does not help you rank either.

Check whether Google already has you

Search Maps for your business name, then your phone number, then your address. Do all three — they miss each other.

Nothing comes up: you are creating a new profile. Carry on to the next step.
A listing exists that nobody has claimed: claim that one. Google will offer you a way to say the business is yours.
A listing exists and somebody else manages it — a previous owner, an old employer, a company that added you to sell you leads: you can request access from them. That request goes to whoever holds it, takes several days, and can be refused or ignored. Worth starting, and worth knowing it may not work.

Watch out

Never create a second profile to get around an existing one. Duplicates get one or both suspended, and untangling them afterwards is harder than either — including losing the reviews that were on the original.

Create the profile

Search for “Google Business Profile” and use the result on google.com — not a link from an email.

Enter the registered name, then pick your main category: the closest honest description of what you do, not the most impressive one. The category has a real effect on which searches you turn up in, and you can add secondary ones afterwards.

You will be asked whether customers come to a place you own. For almost everyone reading this the answer is no — you go to them.

Hide your home address

This is the one to get right the first time. Say no to a visitable location, and set a service area instead.

Your address is still given to Google — they need it to verify you — but it is not shown on the map. This is what Google calls a service-area business, and it is what almost every trade run from home should be.

Set the service area to where you genuinely take work. Listing half the state does not widen your reach; Google shows you to people near you.

Watch out

A published home address goes on the map and is hard to walk back — people take copies and other sites scrape it. You have already put that address on the public record with the state; the map is a far more visible place. Decide now rather than after your first booking.

Fill in the parts customers actually use

Five fields do almost all of the work. The rest can wait.

Hours — real ones. The profile will tell people you are open, and someone turning up against a wrong time is the complaint that becomes a one-star review.
The website field: your booking page. If there is a booking link field as well, the same address goes there. The whole value of the listing is somebody going from the map to a booked job without phoning you.
Your services, with plain names and prices where you can. The same list you set up on your booking page.
A description written the way you would describe the work to a neighbour. It is not a place for keywords.
Photos: your van, your equipment, finished work, and you. Real job photographs do more here than anything else on the page, and a profile with none reads as abandoned.

Verification — the part people give up on

Google will not show your profile until it is satisfied the business is real. For a business run from home with no shopfront, that almost always means a video.

One continuous, unedited recording on your phone. No cuts. Film in daylight, keep it steady, and narrate what you are showing.

Then it goes to Google and you wait. We are not going to quote you a time, because nobody honest can — it may be quick, it may take weeks, and they can come back and ask for a second attempt.

Where you are: a street, your vehicle, the outside of wherever you work from.
The equipment you actually use, and enough of it to be convincing.
You — plus something tying the business to you: paperwork with the business name on it, a branded shirt or magnetic sign, keys to the van, your registration documents on screen.

Watch out

It has to be you filming, and it has to be your own business. We are not permitted to do this part for you, and neither is anyone else — a profile Google believes was verified by somebody other than the owner is taken down, along with any reviews on it.

Also worth knowing

If it comes back rejected

Common, particularly for home-based businesses with no signage, and not a judgment about you or your paperwork.

Read what they asked for and film it again, showing more: more equipment, more of the surroundings, more documentation with the business name visible. Most second attempts that fail failed for the same reason as the first.

There is an appeal process. It is slow and does not explain itself — use it if a re-shoot does not work.

Your booking page and your business are unaffected while this is going on. Nothing else you have set up depends on it.

Reviews, once it is live

Ask. Most people are willing and simply never think of it — the moment is when you finish a job and they are pleased.

Google gives you a short link to share. Reply to all of them, good and bad: the reply is read by the next person deciding whether to book you, not by the reviewer.

You cannot have an honest bad review removed, and neither can anyone you pay. You can report one that breaks Google’s rules — abuse, a competitor, someone who was never a customer — and it may or may not come down.

Watch out

Never buy reviews or ask friends who were not customers. It is the fastest way to lose the profile entirely.

It can change without you

Members of the public can suggest edits to your hours, phone number and category, and Google sometimes applies them without asking.

Look at your profile once a month and check it still says what you wrote. Update hours before holidays — a profile that says open when you are not is worse than one that says closed.

If your details change, change them here as well as on your booking page.

A straight answer about showing up first

Google decides who appears in the map block mainly on how close you are to the person searching, how well you match what they typed, and how established you look.

Only some of that is in your control, and distance is not. A complete profile with real photos and steady reviews does better than an empty one. There is no setting that puts you first, and nobody who cold-calls offering to arrange it can do that either.

The calls you are about to start getting

Registering a business puts your details on a public record, and a whole industry reads it.

Expect calls and official-looking mail about your Google listing: that it is unverified, expiring, about to be removed, or that they can rank you first. Google does not phone you to sell you your own listing, and there is nothing to pay.

The same goes for mail about your LLC that looks like it came from the state. If something arrives that worries you, send it to us and we will tell you whether it is real.

What we can and cannot do here

We cannot create, claim or verify a profile for you, and we are not going to manage it afterwards. Both of those are deliberate.

Google requires the owner to do it, and a profile verified by anyone else is a profile at risk of being removed. That is a rule we are not going to quietly break on your behalf.

And a listing we hold is a listing you would lose if you ever left us, along with every review on it. It should be in your account, under your control, permanently.

What we will do: tell you it exists, which is the part nobody else does, keep this guide current, make sure the name you use matches what we filed, and answer a question when you get stuck.

Google changes this process and renames these buttons regularly. If something here no longer matches what is on your screen, tell us and we will fix it. We would rather hear it from you than find out later.