Getting your business onto Google Maps, and why it matters more than you think

Google Business Profile is the listing that shows up on the right side of a search, and on Google Maps. It’s free. Most established Indian businesses have one, usually created years ago by somebody who’s left, and usually about a third complete.

For a business with a physical location, this listing often outperforms the website for enquiries. Especially on a phone, where the call button sits right there.

Claim it first

Search your company name and see what comes up. If a listing exists that you don’t control, there’s a Claim this business link. Google verifies by post, phone or video depending on the category. The postcard route takes a couple of weeks in India and it does work.

If no listing exists, create one. Use the legal name of the business, the one on your GST registration, rather than a shortened version.

The fields most companies leave empty

• Category. Pick the most specific one that fits. Auto parts manufacturer beats manufacturer. This single field drives a lot of which searches you appear in.
• Hours. Including the holidays. A listing showing open when you’re shut costs you a wasted trip and a bad review.
• Products and services. There’s a whole section for this and almost nobody fills it. Each entry is text that Google reads.
• Photographs. Your plant, your team, your product. Listings with real photographs get noticeably more engagement than ones with a logo and nothing else.
• Description. Say what you make, who buys it, and where you deliver. Plain sentences.

Reviews, and the honest way to get them

Reviews matter for how you rank in the local results, and they matter for whether somebody calls. B2B businesses tend to assume reviews are a restaurant thing. They aren’t.

Ask your existing customers. The ones who’ve been buying from you for a decade will usually say yes if you actually ask. Send them the direct review link rather than telling them to search for you.

Don’t buy reviews. Google catches this more often than the people selling them admit, and a suspended listing takes weeks to recover.

Where the website still matters

The listing gets you found. The website is where a serious buyer goes to check whether you’re real. Someone spending eight lakh on an order will click through to your site, and what they find there decides the enquiry.

So the two work together. A complete listing with a dated website behind it converts poorly. We see it constantly in audits. The listing brings people in and the site loses them.

Multiple locations

If you have branches, each one gets its own listing with its own address and phone number. Not one listing for the head office. A buyer in Nashik searching for your service wants the Nashik branch, and a single Mumbai listing won’t show up for them.

Each branch should also have a page on your website with that branch’s address written as text. The cluster by cluster version of this is on the locations pages. Link the listing to that page rather than to the home page.

Written by Sameer Gaikwad, founder of Buildgin. Thirty three years in electrical power systems across global MNCs, now applying the same condition monitoring habit to websites.