Claim and verify your Google Business Profile

Find it before you create it

Google often creates a listing for a business before the business does, from map data, directories or customer activity. Search Google Maps for the business name and address. If a listing exists, claim it; creating a second one produces a duplicate, which Google's guidelines prohibit and which splits reviews between two records. If none exists, create one at Google's business site with the exact trading name, address and phone number you decided to use in the baseline.

Claim it under your own account

Use a Google account that belongs to the business and will outlive any contractor, employee or agency. The commonest local SEO disaster is a profile owned by someone who has left. If someone else does the work, add them as a manager; ownership stays with the business. The hiring chapter makes this a criterion.

Verify

Google decides which verification methods it offers a given business: video, phone, email, a postcard to the address, or, for some, instant verification through Search Console. Follow the method offered. Video verification, now common, asks you to show the premises, signage, and evidence you can operate the business; have those ready. Verification can take days. Do not edit the listing heavily while it is pending.

One profile per location

Google's guidelines allow one profile per physical location that customers can visit, or one profile per service area for a business that travels to customers. A business with a shop and a van has one profile. A business with two shops has two. A business that would like to appear in Swords, Tallaght and Bray does not get three profiles at three addresses; that is against the guidelines and can get all of them suspended. The address and service area chapter covers the honest way to cover an area.

Report duplicates

If a search turns up a second listing for the business, old address, old name, an employee's attempt, use Google's process to report it as a duplicate and ask for it to be merged or removed. Reviews on the duplicate may be lost, which is one more reason to do this early.

Illustrative example. A café that moved premises two years ago finds two listings: the old address, unclaimed, with forty reviews, and the new one, claimed by a former manager who has left. The steps are to recover ownership of the new listing through Google's ownership request process, then mark the old one as moved to the new address so Google can merge them. That describes the mechanism, not a result.

Output

A verified profile, owned by the business's own account, with no duplicates outstanding. Record the verification date in the baseline. Then move to categories, which is the single most consequential setting on the profile.