How do I get my business on Google Maps?

First, check whether you’re already on Google Maps

Search Google Maps for your business name and your town before you add anything. Customers and Google add businesses all the time, so yours may already have a listing you’ve never seen, with an old number or the wrong hours on it.

If it’s there and nobody has claimed it, open it and choose “Claim this business”, then “Manage now”. If someone else verified it, a former employee or a previous web designer, ask them to make you an owner, or request ownership through Google. Don’t add a second listing beside it: claim the one that’s there, so your customers and your reviews end up in one place.

How to add your business to Google Maps

1. Use a Google account your business owns. Not a staff member’s and not your web designer’s: whoever owns the profile controls it, its photos and its reviews. You can add other people as managers later.
2. Go to business.google.com/add and choose “Add your business to Google”. It costs nothing.
3. Enter your name exactly as customers see it, on your signage and your invoices. Adding your town or what you sell to it breaks Google’s rules, and a profile can be suspended for it.
4. Pick the most specific primary category Google has for what you do: a nail salon rather than a salon. Add only the few more it takes to describe your core business.
5. Say where customers find you. If they come to you, give your street address: Google won’t take a PO box or a virtual office. If you go to them, or work from home, you’re a service-area business: remove your address and list up to 20 areas you serve, within about two hours’ drive of your base.
6. Add a phone number and your website. A number that rings at your business, not a call centre, and the address of your own site.
7. Verify the profile, the way Google offers you.

How Google verifies your business

Google decides which ways you can verify, from your kind of business, where you are and your hours, and you can’t change them. You’ll be offered one or more of these:

• A video recording, which Google recommends when it’s offered: one unedited recording of at least 30 seconds, filmed live on your phone through the profile.
• A phone call or a text with a code. It won’t get through a switchboard menu.
• An email to an address shown on the screen.
• A live video call with Google, during your business hours.
• A postcard with a five-digit code. Not every business is offered one; most arrive within 14 days and expire after 30.

A verification video has to show three things: where you are (street signs, your building number, a landmark), that the business is real (your signage and premises, or the tools and products you work with), and that you run it (unlocking the premises, using the till, opening a branded vehicle). Leave out ID, bank and tax numbers and other people’s faces. If Google turns a video down, it tells you what was missing: record a new one with everything from the first plus that.

Google reviews a verification in up to 5 business days, sometimes longer. If your website is already verified in Google Search Console, Google can verify the profile straight away.

What to fill in once you’re verified

A profile with three fields filled in loses to one with all of them. Google calls this relevance: the more it knows about what you do and when, the more searches it can match you to.

• Your hours, including special hours for public holidays, so nobody drives out to a locked door.
• Real photos: the outside, so people recognise it; the inside; your work; the people customers will deal with.
• A description of up to 750 characters: what you do, for whom and where. Google allows no links in it, and wants your business described, not promotions or prices.
• Your services and products, each with what it includes.
• Your website, and a booking or quote link if people can book or ask for a quote online.

Google checks edits before they go live. Change your name after verifying and you may have to verify again; move to a new address and you must.

Listed isn’t found: how Google ranks you on Maps

Google says its local results come down mainly to three things, and that there’s no way to pay for a better position on the map.

Relevance

How well your profile matches the search: the right categories, every field filled in, and what your website says about what you do.

Distance

How far you are from the person searching. It’s why a business shows up first when someone searches in its own town, and further down for the same search 40 kilometres away.

Prominence

How well known you are: how many reviews you have and how good they are, and how many websites link to yours.

Distance you can’t change. Relevance and prominence you build, and three things do most of the work.

Reviews, asked for every time

Ask every happy customer, while they’re still happy. In your profile, Read reviews, then Get more reviews, gives you a short link and a QR code (the QR code only on a computer) for your WhatsApp messages, invoices and thank-you emails. Reply to every review, good or bad. Never offer anything in return for one: Google calls that fake engagement and removes it, and reviews from you, your family or your staff break its rules on conflicts of interest.

A website of your own

Your website is where people go to compare you, and it’s what Google reads to understand you: your services in full, your towns, and the same name, address and phone as your profile, marked up so search engines tie the site to the profile. The websites that link to yours count towards your prominence, and without a website of your own there’s nothing for them to link to.

The same details everywhere

List your business on the directories your customers use, with exactly the name, address and phone on your profile. Customers who find you there see the same business, and the listings that link to your website add to the links that count.

Do you need a website if you’re on Google Maps?

Your profile is a listing. It shows your hours, your rating and a way to call, and it puts you on the map next to everyone else who does what you do. It can’t explain why you’re the better choice. That’s the job of a website: what you do, what it costs, the work you’ve done, and a way to ask for a quote that doesn’t depend on catching you on the phone.

Google switched off the free websites it used to make from Business Profiles in 2024, so the Website button on a profile needs a site of your own. A builder can give you one (what a website builder really costs), and so can we: websites designed around your business, built to be found on Google and linked to your profile from the first day.

Already have a site? Our free website check tests whether it gives Google what it needs, your Google listing and your location details among them, in a few seconds.