When someone near you searches for what you sell, Google shows a map with three businesses pinned on it before it shows a single normal website result. Those three get the overwhelming majority of the calls.
Getting in there is free. It takes an afternoon to set up and a habit to maintain. And it’s the single highest-return thing most local businesses in Lancashire can do for themselves without paying anybody a penny.
Here’s how, start to finish, in plain English.
First: you might already be on there
Before you create anything, check. Google builds listings automatically from phone directories, old data and user submissions, so there may already be a profile for your business that you’ve never seen, with the wrong hours, an old number and a photo of your building from three years ago.
Search your business name and your town. If a panel appears on the right-hand side of the results with your details, you have a listing. Look for a line that says “Own this business?” or “Claim this business”. That’s an unclaimed profile, and claiming it is different from creating a new one.
This matters, because creating a second listing when one already exists gives you duplicates, and duplicates split your reviews and confuse Google. Always claim before you create.
If it’s unclaimed: how to claim it
Click “Own this business?” and sign in with a Google account. Use a proper business account if you can. Not a personal Gmail you share with your partner, and definitely not one your old web designer controls.
Google will then verify you actually run the business. Depending on your business type you’ll get one of:
- A video call or recorded video. Increasingly the standard. You’ll be asked to film your premises, your signage, your equipment or tools, and something proving you’re authorised to be there.
- A postcard. Posted to your address with a code, usually five to fourteen days.
- Phone or email. Quicker, and only offered to some businesses.
The video one catches people out, so a tip: have your signage, a van with livery, branded workwear, business paperwork and your tools to hand before you start, and film in one continuous take. Stopping and restarting is the most common reason for a rejection.
If someone else claimed it
This happens more than you’d think. Usually a former employee, an old marketing agency, or a web designer who set it up years ago and has since vanished.
Google has a process for requesting access. You submit a request, they email the current owner, and the current owner has seven days to respond. If they don’t, you can proceed to verify and take it over. If they say no, there’s an appeal route where you prove you own the business.
It’s slow and it’s irritating, but it works. Don’t create a second listing as a workaround, because you’ll make things worse.
If there’s nothing there: creating one
Go to Google Business Profile and choose to add your business. You’ll be asked a handful of questions, and two of them matter far more than the rest.
Your business name
Enter it exactly as it appears on your signage, your van and your paperwork. Nothing else. Not “Thornton’s Plumbing, Emergency Plumber Preston, 24hr Callout”. Stuffing keywords into the name does give a short-term boost, which is why you see it everywhere, but it is against Google’s rules. Competitors can report it in about thirty seconds, and suspensions are a nightmare to undo. So just don’t.
Your primary category
This is the biggest single decision you’ll make, and most people rush it. Google uses your primary category to decide which searches you’re even eligible to appear for. If you file yourself as “Contractor” when you’re a “Bathroom Remodeler”, you’ll be invisible for the searches you actually want.
Look at the three businesses currently in the map box for your main search, check what categories they use, and pick the most specific one that genuinely describes your main service. You can add secondary categories afterwards for everything else.
Service area or address?
This trips up every trade.
If customers come to you, as with a shop, salon, practice or restaurant, you have a physical address and you display it.
If you go to customers, as with a plumber, electrician, mobile groomer or cleaner, you’re a service-area business. You hide the address and list the towns or postcodes you cover instead.
If you work from home, hide your address. You do not want your home address on Google Maps, and Google is fine with this as long as you set it up as a service-area business properly.
One warning: don’t list twenty towns to cast a wide net. A service area that’s implausibly large reads as spam, and being listed for a town doesn’t make you rank there anyway. Proximity to the searcher matters far more than what you type in that box.
The fields almost everybody leaves blank
Once you’re verified, you’ve got a profile. Now comes the part that separates the top three from everyone else, and it’s mostly just filling things in that your competitors haven’t bothered with.
| Section | What to do | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Services | List every service individually with a short description each | Directly matches what people search; usually empty on competitors |
| Description | 750 characters, plain English, what you do and where | Free space to say what you actually offer |
| Opening hours | Accurate, including bank holidays | Wrong hours generate genuinely angry reviews |
| Photos | 15 to 20 minimum, real, recent, geotagged if you can | Profiles with photos get significantly more clicks |
| Products | Works for services too, with prices if you’re comfortable | Barely used, so cheap to win |
| Attributes | Wheelchair access, free parking, women-owned, card payments | Google filters searches on these |
| Q&A | Ask and answer your own common questions | Otherwise a stranger answers wrongly on your behalf |
| Messaging | Only turn on if you’ll answer within hours | Slow replies get penalised |
That Q&A point deserves emphasis. Anyone can answer a question on your listing. If you don’t seed it with your own questions and answers, a member of the public will eventually answer “do they do emergency callouts?” with “I don’t think so”, and it’ll sit there for years.
The photos thing
Take your own. Stock photos of a generic kitchen do nothing.
What works: your premises from the road so people can find you, your team, your van, work in progress, finished jobs, before and afters. Add a few every month rather than twenty in one go and then nothing for a year. Google rewards a profile that looks alive.
Reviews: the part that actually decides it
Everything above gets you listed. Reviews are what get you into the top three and keep you there.
Four things matter, roughly in this order:
- How many. The gap between you and the top three is usually larger than people assume.
- How recent. Twelve reviews this year beats sixty from 2021. Reviews decay.
- Whether you reply. To all of them, good and bad. It’s a visible signal that someone’s home.
- What they say. A review that mentions the service and the town does more work than “great, thanks”.
The practical system: ask every satisfied customer, at the moment they’re happiest, with a link that takes one tap. Google gives you a short review link in your profile. Put it in your invoice footer, your job-done text message, and on a card you hand over.
What not to do: never offer a discount or a prize for reviews, never write them yourself, never ask an agency to supply them. Google is good at spotting bought reviews, and the penalty falls on you, not the seller.
Posts, and why nobody uses them
Your profile lets you publish short posts: offers, updates, events. Almost no small business does it, which is exactly why it’s worth doing. One a week, a couple of sentences and a photo, keeps the profile active.
How long until it works?
Verification takes days to a fortnight. Appearing on Maps at all follows quickly after that. Getting into the top three for a competitive search takes months, and depends mostly on reviews and on how close you are to the person searching.
Proximity is the uncomfortable truth of local search. If you’re on an industrial estate four miles out and your competitor is on the high street, they have an advantage on town-centre searches that you can’t fully overturn. You can still win on the surrounding villages, on specific services, and on searches where the person isn’t in the town centre.
What all this is called
Filling in that profile, choosing categories properly, building reviews and keeping it active is a discipline with a name: local SEO. It’s the branch of search engine optimisation aimed at businesses with a patch rather than a national audience.
You can do all of the above yourself. Genuinely. Nothing in this article requires an agency, and I’ve just given you the whole method.
The one-afternoon version
If you only do four things:
- Claim your profile and get verified.
- Set your primary category correctly, checking what the top three use.
- Fill in the Services section and upload fifteen real photos.
- Ask your last twenty customers for a review, and reply to every one that lands.
That’s most of the value, and it’s an afternoon plus a habit.
If you’d like to know how your profile currently stacks up against the three businesses beating you to the map box, send me your business name and postcode. I’ll check it against them and send you the specific gaps. Free, no obligation, and if it’s just reviews I’ll say so rather than dress it up.
