How Do I Add My Business to Google?
The steps take twenty minutes. The decisions inside them shape what the listing can do for years. Two of them are painful to change later. This guide covers the choices rather than the buttons, starting with the check almost nobody does first.
Check Whether It Already Exists First
Google creates listings from other sources, so a business that has been trading for a few years frequently has one already. Adding a second produces a duplicate. Duplicates are considerably harder to resolve than claiming something that is already there.
How to check. Two searches.
Search your business name with your town, then search your phone number. If a panel appears with your details in it, a listing exists whether anybody at the business created it or not.
What an existing listing looks like. Unclaimed.
Usually thin, with an address and perhaps a phone number, sometimes with reviews on it. There may be an option indicating that nobody has verified it, which is the sign you want.
What to do if you find one. Claim it rather than add.
Claiming keeps whatever the listing has accumulated, including its reviews. Our guide to claiming a Google Business Profile covers each situation, including when somebody else already controls it.
Why the duplicate is worse than the wait. Two listings compete.
Two profiles for one business divide everything between them and can suppress each other. Reviews end up split across both permanently. Removing a duplicate is slow work that a two minute search avoids.
What Setting One Up Involves
We are not going to walk you through where the buttons are, because they have already moved once and any guide built around screenshots is out of date within a year. What the process asks of you does not change, so that is what this covers.
Which account you use. The first real decision.
Create it on an account the business itself controls rather than a personal address belonging to whoever happens to be doing it that afternoon. Listings stranded on a former employee's account are a recurring problem we get called about.
What it asks for. Six things that matter.
Business name, category, whether you have premises customers visit, the address or the area you cover, contact details and hours. Everything else can be added afterwards at leisure.
What it does not ask for. The good bits.
Services, photographs, a description and attributes all come later. They are where most of the benefit sits. Optimising the profile puts that work in order.
What to have ready. Ten minutes of preparation.
Your exact trading name, your genuine opening hours including whether you actually answer the phone at those times, plus a decision about whether customers come to you. Guessing at any of the three is how listings end up needing fixing.
The Name Is Not A Marketing Opportunity
The name field takes the name your business actually trades under. Not the name plus your main service. Not the name plus your town. Google's guidelines are explicit about this and it is one of the commonest reasons listings get suspended.
What people type instead. You have seen it.
Something along the lines of the business name followed by a service and a place, all crammed into a field designed to hold a name. It appears to work, right up until it does not.
Why it is tempting. It looks like it helps.
Listings with stuffed names do sometimes appear for those searches, which is why the practice spreads. It is borrowed visibility on a listing that can be taken away.
Why it is a poor bet. It is the easiest thing to report.
Anybody can flag it, including the competitor sitting below you who has noticed. Suspension follows reports far more often than businesses expect. the suspension guide covers what that costs.
What to do if your name genuinely contains a service. Then it is your name.
Plenty of trades genuinely trade as something descriptive. That is allowed because it is the real name. The test is whether it appears on your invoices and your van rather than whether it reads well in a search result.
Category Is The Decision That Matters Most
The primary category does more than any other single setting to determine which searches your listing can appear for at all. Get it wrong and the profile is invisible for the work you want, however complete the rest of it is.
What it actually controls. Eligibility rather than position.
It governs which searches the listing is considered for. That is a different thing from being pushed up a list. It is why category accuracy beats every technique anybody will sell you.
The rule. Choose what you are.
Not what you would like to be known for. A business under a category it does not belong to competes with businesses that do and loses, while missing the searches it should have won.
Be specific. Specific beats broad.
Where a precise category exists, take it. The trades get this wrong constantly by sitting under something general when a category describing exactly what they do is available.
The method that works. Look at who is already there.
Search the terms that matter and look at what the listings appearing under them use. That tells you more than reading the category list from top to bottom. The optimisation guide covers categories, secondary categories and services in full.
Address And Whether You Show One
There are two kinds of business here. One that customers come to. One that travels to customers. The setup asks you which you are, then the answer determines how the listing behaves from then on.
If customers visit you. Show the address.
A shop, a salon, a garage or a yard with a counter. The address is a genuine asset, because local results favour businesses near the person searching.
If you travel to customers. Enter it and hide it.
A plumber, an electrician, a mobile groomer or a cleaner working from home enters the address then hides it and sets a service area. That is the correct setting rather than a trick. Showing a home address instead is worse.
Set the service area truthfully. Where you genuinely work.
An enormous radius does not extend your reach and can look implausible. Cover the places you would actually accept a job in this week.
The line we will not cross. A real place of business.
No virtual offices, no mailbox addresses, no relative's house in the next town and no address per area you cover. These are the classic suspension causes rather than clever workarounds. the suspension guide explains what happens when they are caught.
What You Cannot Change Easily Later
Some fields can be edited on a Tuesday afternoon with no consequences. Others trigger a fresh review of the whole listing. A listing under review is a listing not working for you. Worth knowing which is which before you start.
Easy to change. Most of it.
Hours, photographs, services, the description, attributes and your website link. Edit these freely and often, because they are meant to be kept current.
Consequential to change. Name, address and category.
These can trigger re-verification. While that is happening the listing can lose visibility. That is the whole reason this page is organised around getting them right first.
Do not make a batch of changes at once. Space them out.
Several significant edits in the same session can prompt a review that none of them would have prompted alone. If you have inherited a listing needing several corrections, do them deliberately rather than in one sitting.
What this means for a new listing. Slow down for ten minutes.
The name, the category and the address decision cost nothing to get right at the start and cost weeks to fix afterwards. Everything else you can iterate on for years.
What Happens Next
Creating the listing is not the finish line. Almost nothing works until it is verified, which is the stage where people get stuck and where the timescales stop being predictable.
What verification is for. Proving the business is real.
Google wants evidence that the business exists and operates where it says. Which method you are offered depends on the business type rather than on what you would prefer.
Why it matters that you prepared properly. Consistency helps.
A listing whose details match what appears elsewhere about the business tends to have an easier time of it. A listing with a stuffed name and a questionable address does not.
What to do while you wait. Fill in the rest.
Services, photographs, hours and a description can all be prepared. the verification guide covers the methods, what catches people out and what to do when an attempt fails.
Where this sits in the whole job. The beginning.
Created, verified, then completed properly, then maintained. The full series sits on the Google Business Profile guide.
The mistakes
made in the first
ten minutes
take weeks to fix.
A stuffed business name, a category chosen for reach rather than accuracy, an address that is not a real place of business or a second listing created because nobody checked for the first one. All four are common and all four are avoidable.
What we get right at the start:
If a listing already exists, claiming it keeps the reviews. Creating a second one loses them.
Every guide.
One profile.
Getting set up, claiming and verifying, optimising the listing properly, suspensions and reinstatement, reviews, reading the performance data and appearing in the local pack and in Maps.
