How do I get my business on Google?

Step 1: Claim and verify your Google Business Profile

A Google Business Profile is the free listing that appears in Google Maps and in the map results on Google Search. For a local business it's usually the quickest way to show up, and it works even before you have a website.

Check that your business qualifies

Google lists businesses that meet customers in person during their stated hours: either a place customers visit, like a shop, café or office, or a business that travels to customers, like a plumber, a cleaner or a mobile dog groomer. Online-only businesses aren't eligible. If you work from home and travel to customers, set a service area and hide your address. Google's guidelines for Business Profiles have the full rules.

Set it up

1. Search Google Maps for your business name. If a listing already exists, claim it rather than creating a second one.
2. Otherwise, create a profile in Google Business Profile with your real business name, exactly as it appears on your signs and paperwork, with no extra keywords.
3. Choose the primary category that best describes what you do, then add a few secondary categories that also fit.
4. Add your phone number, website and hours, and either your address or your service area.
5. Verify the profile. Google chooses which methods you can use: often a phone call, text, email or a short video of your business, and sometimes a postcard.
6. Fill in the rest: your services, a description, attributes and real photos of your work, your team and your place.

Keep the profile current. Update holiday hours, answer questions, add new photos and reply to reviews. A listing with the wrong hours costs you customers and their trust.

Step 2: Add your website to Google Search Console

Google finds most websites on its own eventually, but Google Search Console lets you tell it your site exists, see which pages it has found, and spot problems that keep pages out of search. It's free.

1. Sign in with a Google account and add your site. A domain property covers every version of your address and is verified with a DNS record at your domain registrar; a URL prefix property can be verified with a file or a tag on the site.
2. Submit your sitemap: a file, usually at /sitemap.xml, that lists your pages. Most website builders and designers create one for you.
3. Use the URL Inspection tool on your home page and your main service pages, and request indexing.
4. After a few days, check the page indexing report for pages Google couldn't add, and the reason it gives.
5. Come back monthly to the Performance report, which shows the searches you appear for, how often, and how many people click.

Do the same in Bing Webmaster Tools, which can import your site from Search Console in a few clicks. Bing's index is also used by some other search engines, so it's worth the few minutes.

If a page still won't appear, check that it isn't marked noindex and that your robots.txt file doesn't block it. Both are common leftovers from when a site was being built.

Step 3: Write clear page titles and descriptions

The page title is the headline of a search result, and the description is often the text underneath. They're the first thing searchers read, so they decide whether people click.

• Put the service and the place first. "Emergency plumber in Tacoma, WA | Harbor Plumbing" says far more than "Home" or "Welcome".
• Keep titles to about 50 to 60 characters so they aren't cut off, and descriptions to about 150 to 160.
• Make every page's title and description different, and match them to what that page is actually about.
• Write the description for a person: what you offer, where, and a reason to choose you, like same-day visits or free estimates.
• Give each page one main heading that says the same thing as the title, in plain words.

Google sometimes rewrites titles and descriptions to suit a particular search, but it usually starts from what you wrote.

Step 4: Give every service and area its own page

Google matches searches to pages, not to whole websites. If one page lists ten services in a line each, it has little chance of showing up for any of them. A page for each main service, with what it includes, how it's priced, how long it takes and photos of real jobs, gives Google and customers something specific to work with.

Pages for the areas you serve

If you travel to customers, a page for each main town or neighborhood you serve can help, as long as each one says something real: the jobs you do there, how quickly you can get there, local details. Pages that are copies with only the town name swapped go against Google's spam policies and tend to do more harm than good.

Start with your most important services and your main areas, and add more as you go. Our guide to how many pages a website needs helps you decide where to start.

Step 5: Keep your name, address and phone number the same everywhere

Search engines compare what different sites say about you. When your business name, address and phone number (often shortened to NAP) match everywhere, it's easier for them to be sure every listing is the same business, and easier for customers to trust what they read.

• Use one spelling of your name, one phone number and one address format on your website, your profiles and your listings.
• Put them in your website's footer as text, not inside an image, so they appear on every page.
• When you move or change numbers, update every listing, not just your website.
• Close or merge duplicate listings, such as one at an old address or a second profile someone else created.

Other listings worth claiming

• Bing Places for Business, which can import your Google profile.
• Apple Business Connect, which controls how you appear in Apple Maps.
• Yelp and Facebook, which many people check for reviews and hours.
• Industry directories: your trade association, wedding or home-improvement directories, legal or professional directories, and your local chamber of commerce.

Step 6: Ask real customers for reviews

Reviews help people choose between businesses nearby, and Google says the number of reviews and their ratings are part of how it judges a business in local results.

• Ask soon after a job goes well, while it's fresh, in person or with a short message.
• Send the review link from your Business Profile, so leaving a review takes one tap.
• Ask every customer, not only the ones you expect to be happy. Google's policies don't allow asking selectively for positive reviews.
• Reply to every review, good or bad, politely and briefly. Future customers read the replies.
• Link to your reviews from your website, so visitors can read them where they were written.

Never buy, swap or write reviews, or offer discounts in return for them. Google removes fake reviews and can restrict or suspend a profile, and in the US a Federal Trade Commission rule that took effect in 2024 bans fake reviews and paying for positive ones.

Step 7: Make your pages fast and easy to use on a phone

Local searches often happen on a phone, in the street or in a car, and Google mainly looks at the mobile version of a site when it decides what to show. A page that's slow or fiddly on a small screen loses people before they read a word.

• Resize and compress photos before they go on the site. Large images are a common cause of slow pages.
• Make phone numbers tap-to-call and buttons big enough for a thumb.
• Use text large enough to read without zooming.
• Use https, so browsers don't warn visitors that the site isn't secure.
• Test your pages with Google's free PageSpeed Insights, which checks speed on mobile and desktop and suggests fixes.

How long does it take to show up on Google?

A verified Business Profile can appear in Maps within days. A new website's pages are often indexed within days to weeks once they're submitted in Search Console, but ranking well for competitive searches like "plumber near me" can take months, and depends on how many other businesses compete for them.

For local results, Google says it weighs three things: relevance (how well your listing matches the search), distance (how far you are from the person searching, or the place they named) and prominence (how well known you are, including your reviews and what's said about you across the web). You can improve relevance and prominence; you can't change distance.

That's also why nobody can promise you a particular position on Google, whatever they charge, so be wary of anyone who does. What you can do is keep the basics right and keep adding useful, specific pages. The same foundations help with the written answers some search tools now give; our guide to answer engine optimization explains how.

How we help you get found on Google

Every site we build at Cider Websites ships with search-ready page titles and descriptions, a design that works well on phones, and https on your own domain. Tell us your services and the areas you serve in your brief, and we plan the pages around them.

If you'd rather not do the rest yourself, add-ons to our care plan cover it:

• SEO & AEO care ($249 a month): search and answer-engine tuning every month, covering titles, descriptions, page structure and Search Console checks, with a short report.
• Google Business Profile ($49 a month): your Google listing kept current, with hours, photos, posts and replies to reviews.

They're add-ons to the care plan, for sites we build and host, and you can drop any of them at any time. Already have a site somewhere else? We can rebuild it as a redesign at the same fixed prices, from $499. We don't promise positions or a number of calls, because no one can. We do the work that gives your business its best chance of being found, and tell you what we did.

Questions people ask

Read next

• What is answer engine optimization, and how is it different from SEO?Answer engine optimization (AEO) explained: how it differs from SEO, and what helps chat-style search tools read, quote and mention a small business.
• Do I need a website for my small business?Do you need a website if you have Facebook, Instagram or a Google Business Profile? What each does well, where it falls short, and what a simple site needs.
• What should a small business website include?What every small business website should include: the must-have pages and details, the nice-to-haves, what to leave out, and a checklist to use before launch.
• ServicesWebsite design and redesign, hosting and care, SEO and answer-engine care, content and Google Business Profile upkeep, at fixed prices from $499.