How to get your business on Google.

What "getting on Google" actually means

When someone searches "electrician near me" or "hairdresser Cleveleys", Google shows two different things on the same page. Near the top sits the map pack: a map with three local businesses, their star ratings, and a call button. Below it come the ordinary website results. They're ranked by different systems, and you want to be in both.

The map pack is powered by your Google Business Profile (you may remember it as Google My Business) - the free listing that holds your address or service area, hours, phone number, photos and reviews. The website results are powered by, well, your website. A business with a strong profile and no website is invisible in half the page; a business with a website and no profile is invisible in the half that gets tapped first on a phone. This guide covers the profile; the website side is covered across the rest of our guides.

One thing worth saying plainly before the steps: the profile is free, forever. Companies cold-call small businesses claiming Google is about to delete their listing unless they pay a "registration" or "management" fee. It's nonsense. Everything below costs nothing but an evening.

Setting up your profile, step by step

Go to google.com/business and sign in with a Google account - use one that belongs to the business, not an employee's personal account you'll lose access to when they leave. Then:

• 1. Search for your business first. Google often already has a stub listing built from directories and map data. If one exists, claim it - don't create a second one. Duplicates cause trouble later (more on that below).
• 2. Enter your business name exactly as it appears in the real world. On your sign, your invoices, your van. Not "Smith Plumbing | Boiler Repairs Blackpool Fylde" - stuffing keywords into the name field breaks Google's rules and is one of the quickest routes to a suspension.
• 3. Choose your business type - storefront or service area. This one deserves its own section, so it has one, below.
• 4. Pick your categories. Also its own section. It's the single most important field on the profile.
• 5. Add your phone number and website. The same phone number that's on your website, formatted the same way. Consistency between the profile, your site and other listings is a genuine ranking signal - if you've read our website checklist, this is the same name-address-phone rule from there.
• 6. Verify. Google has to confirm you actually are the business - by postcard to the address, or increasingly by phone, email or a video call where you show the premises, your equipment or your signage. Do it promptly; an unverified profile shows to no one.
• 7. Fill in everything else. Hours (including holiday hours - a "closed" door the listing said was open costs you the customer and the review), a plain-English description, services with prices where you can, and photos. Real photos: your shopfront, your work, your van, your face. Profiles with genuine photos get more calls than profiles with a logo and nothing else, and customers can tell stock imagery at a glance.

Twenty minutes of form-filling, then the verification wait. The businesses that win the map pack aren't doing anything cleverer than this - they're just among the few who did all of it.

Categories: the decision that does the ranking

Your primary category tells Google which searches you belong in, and it outweighs everything else on the profile. Pick from Google's fixed list - you can't invent your own - and be as specific as the list allows. A guest house should be "Bed & breakfast" or "Guest house", not "Hotel", if that's what it is; a plumber who mostly fits bathrooms may do better as "Bathroom remodeler" than "Plumber", depending on which customers they actually want.

Then add secondary categories for everything else you genuinely do - a café that does outside catering, a salon that does nails. Genuinely is the operative word: categories you can't deliver just dilute the signal and invite reports from competitors. Two practical tips: look up what categories the businesses currently in the map pack for your target search are using (a browser extension or a look at their profile usually reveals it), and revisit your choice occasionally - Google adds new, more specific categories all the time.

Storefront or service area? Get this right

Google splits local businesses into two kinds, and choosing wrongly causes most of the messes we get asked to untangle:

• Storefront: customers come to you - shops, salons, cafés, hotels, showrooms. Your address is shown publicly, with a pin on the map. The pin should sit on your actual front door; a surprising number sit on the wrong building or round the back, which misdirects customers and muddies which streets you rank for. Check it, and drag it if it's wrong.
• Service-area business: you go to customers - trades, cleaners, dog walkers, mobile anything. You hide your address (Google requires this if the address is your home) and instead list the towns or postcodes you cover. Be honest about the radius: listing every town in Lancashire doesn't make you rank in all of them - the profile ranks best near your real base, and a fantasy service area just looks like spam.

A hybrid - say, a plumbing firm with a trade counter that also does callouts - can show the address and a service area. The test is simple: if a customer turned up at the address, would that be normal? If not, hide it.

Reviews: how to ask, and how to respond

Reviews are the strongest lever you control after categories - they influence ranking, and they're the first thing a would-be customer reads. Two halves to get right:

Asking. The businesses with hundreds of reviews aren't luckier than you; they ask, every time, and they make it effortless. Your profile has a share link ("Ask for reviews" in the dashboard) that takes people straight to the review box - put it in the invoice email, the job-done text message, a QR code on the counter. Ask at the moment of satisfaction: when the boiler's fixed, when the guest checks out happy, not three weeks later. What you must not do is pay for reviews, swap them with other businesses, ask staff or family to pile in, or review-gate (asking only the happy customers by filtering them first) - all of it breaks Google's rules, and a batch of suspiciously similar five-stars is more likely to get reviews wiped than to help.

Responding. Reply to every review, briefly and like a human being. For the good ones, a specific thank-you ("Glad the new bathroom's getting used, John") beats a pasted "Thanks for your feedback!" a hundred times over. For the bad ones: don't argue, don't get personal, and remember the reply's real audience is the hundreds of future customers reading it, not the one unhappy reviewer. Acknowledge, state your side once, calmly, and offer to sort it offline. A graceful reply under a two-star review is some of the best marketing you'll ever write. Our own reviews are public here - we're rated 5.0 on Google, and it's a rating we work to keep.

The mistakes that quietly sink listings

Most profile problems come from the same short list:

• The wrong pin. Especially in terraced streets, new builds and shared buildings, Google's automatic pin placement is often out by a few doors - or a few streets. Customers navigate to the wrong place, and Google half-associates you with the wrong location. Check the pin on the actual map, not just the address field.
• Duplicate listings. A stub Google created years ago, plus the one you made, plus one a previous owner set up - each splitting your reviews and confusing the signal. Search Maps for your name and old addresses; merge or remove duplicates through the profile dashboard ("Business Profile is a duplicate") rather than leaving them to fight each other.
• Keyword-stuffed names. Tempting, because it works right up until it doesn't. Your business name field should match your signage. Competitors can and do report stuffed names, and the penalty is suspension, not a telling-off.
• Suspensions. If your profile vanishes, it's usually one of: a name violation, an address Google doubts (virtual offices and PO boxes are against the rules), a public home address on a service-area business, or a burst of big edits that tripped an automated filter. The fix is unglamorous: make the profile squeaky-clean and truthful, gather evidence (photos of signage, utility bills), and file a reinstatement request. Never create a fresh listing to route around a suspension - that compounds the problem.
• Letting it go stale. Old hours, a dead phone number, Christmas opening from two years ago. The profile is a shop window; nobody trusts a dusty one.

How the website and the profile reinforce each other

The profile gets you found; the website gets you chosen. Someone taps your map listing, likes the stars, then hits your site to answer the real questions - can I see your work, what do you charge, do you cover my street, do you look like a business that'll still exist next year? A profile linking to no website, or to a broken one, leaks exactly the customers the profile just won.

It runs the other way too. Google cross-references the profile against the web, so a site that states your name, address, phone and services - consistently, on real pages - gives the listing evidence to rank on. A page for each area you genuinely serve helps both halves at once; it's how our own area pages earn their keep, and it's why we build the same structure for customers - see the Blackpool trades page for what that looks like for a local firm. The two aren't competing channels. They're one system, and the businesses at the top of the map pack almost always have both halves done.

If the website half is the bit you're missing: that's what we do, from Blackpool, since 2016 - £99 setup then £29.99 a month, with hosting, domain, email and unlimited edits included, and the local SEO groundwork in this guide set up as part of the build. But claim your profile this week either way. It's free, and it's probably the highest-value twenty minutes available to a local business.