Take your phone and search for your trade and your town. "Plumber Tartu". "Hairdresser Pärnu". "Car repair Viljandi".
There is no blue link at the top. At the top there is a map, and under it three businesses, each with a name, a rating and an opening time. Only below those does the thing we all call search results begin. Those three places are what a local business is actually competing for, and fourth is not "nearly third": fourth is behind a button most people never press.
The most common situation we see, though, is a third one. The website ranks respectably in the ordinary results, and the business is nowhere on the map at all. Bad news, because you are losing customers in a place you never look at. Good news, because it is one of the very few visibility problems you can fix in an evening, without spending anything.
Why that block eats the attention
When a search has a place in it, the machine assumes you want to go somewhere, and it shows you a map before anything else. Your phone knows where you are, so even "plumber" with no town attached is a local search.
Run a test: search for your trade and your town, and count how many times you have to scroll before you reach the first ordinary result. On a phone the answer is usually one to two scrolls. Your website, however good it is, is standing where most eyes never get to.
An honest limit right here: if your customer is looking for something with no place attached, no map block appears at all, and if you sell across the country by post, the map matters less to you than the website does. A local service, a shop, a clinic, a workshop: there it matters more than anything we know how to do on a website.
Free, and undone for exactly that reason
The business listing costs nothing. You get no invoice for it and nobody rings you up to sell it. People ring you about websites, people ring you about advertising, nobody rings you about the listing.
A broken listing throws no error message. A wrong category does not send you a letter. You simply do not appear, and you have no way of knowing that you do not appear.
Within our own work this is the most profitable hour there is. We sell websites, and we are telling you anyway: if you are a local business and your listing is broken, fix the listing first. The listing is free and takes one evening; the website side is months of work. If both are broken, start with the cheap one.
Take the listing into your own hands
The first step is not creating one, it is looking: a listing may already exist without anyone in your building having made it. Search your trading name and your town on your phone. One of three answers comes back.
- There is no listing. Creating it is tonight's job.
- There is a listing, with an invitation to claim the business next to it. Nobody is managing it. Take it.
- There is a listing and somebody is already managing it. The question is who.
I am not going to write down which button carries which label: that interface changes several times a year and precise instructions go stale faster than the article does. Look for the meaning rather than the button. Somewhere next to the listing there is a line offering you the management of this business, usually with the word for confirming or claiming on it.
After that you have to prove you really are that business. The most common route is a postcard to the address with a code on it; sometimes a call, a video or an email is offered instead. A postcard takes a week or two, so start before you are in a hurry.
When the listing is in somebody else's hands it is almost always innocent: years ago an intern, a former marketing person or an agency you no longer work with set it up. Ring them and ask, it takes five minutes. Just do not create a second listing because the first one is locked: then there are two of your business on the map, your reviews split between them, and both are weaker than the one proper listing would have been.
The fields that actually move it
A listing has a lot of boxes and most of them change nothing. These four change things.
The category
When a listing simply does not appear, the cause is most often here. The primary category is what the machine uses to decide which searches you are even considered for. A wrong primary category does not make you worse, it makes you invisible: you are not in that competition at all.
An example we have seen several times: a company fits windows and is listed as a construction company. Somebody searches for window fitting, and the company is nowhere, because it described itself with the general word that sounded better.
Your primary category is the one word you would accept if you were only allowed one. Not the grandest, the most exact. Secondary categories are worth adding, but they do not carry the same weight.
A check that takes four minutes: search for the word your customer says, not the word you say. A customer does not search for "integrated indoor climate solutions", they search for air conditioning installation. Look at who comes up on the map, and open their listings. The category is visible there.
A service area or a street
People come to one kind of business: a shop, a salon, a clinic, a cafe. The other kind goes to people: a plumber, an electrician, a cleaner. If nobody comes to you, do not enter an address where you do not receive customers. Otherwise there is a pin on the map sitting on your house, and somebody knocks on that door at six in the evening.
An honest note here too: hiding the address does not make you independent of place. With a service area, distance is still measured from your registered point. You get to choose what you show; you do not get to choose where the machine measures from.
Opening hours, exceptions included
Most people have filled in the ordinary hours. The exceptions are the reason this section exists at all: midsummer, Christmas, that week in July when you are closed.
A listing that says open and a door that is locked is the most expensive mistake in this article. That is where the one star reviews come from. Put fifteen minutes in your calendar in January and enter the year's public holidays in one go.
Name, address and phone in exactly the same text
Those three facts are written in many places at once: the listing, the website footer, the contact page, the business register, your invoices, directory sites. "The same" here means the same character for character:
- "OU Naide" and "Naide OU"
- "Tartu mnt 5" and "Tartu maantee 5"
- "+372 5555 5555" and "55555555"
A person reads every one of those pairs as a single company. A machine compares strings, and it does not know that "mnt" is short for "maantee", the Estonian for road. If your details exist in five places in five wordings, it has no confirmation that these are one business. It is not deciding against you; it simply has nothing to decide on.
The fix is stupidly simple: write one block in one text file, with the name, the address and the phone number each in one single form. That file is now the truth, and you paste the new form everywhere from there. And do not stuff keywords into the name: "Naide OU - the best plumbing in Tartu" is not your trading name.
Photos: the real place and the real people
On a website, a stock photo is a small sin. On a listing it is visibly wrong, because the listing's only job is to tell a person "this is the place you will arrive at". A smiling stranger in an office that does not exist in Estonia does the opposite: the person recognises the photo and starts wondering whether the rest is real.
What people actually look at: the door from the street, from exactly the direction they arrive from. The parking, if it is confusing. The room inside, as it is today. And the people who actually open the door.
A phone camera is enough: daylight, no filters, eight to ten pictures, half an hour of work. An honest note at the end: photos do not move your position on the map much. They move whether the person who has already found you picks up the phone.
Reviews
How to ask without the awkwardness
When you ask matters more than how you word it. Ask when the work has just gone well and the person has said so out loud. Not a week later by email, when the feeling has cooled.
One sentence is enough: "If you have a moment, write us a couple of words on Google. It helps us more than anything else does." Keep a short link ready on your phone and send it by text right away. If the person has to go looking for you, they will not.
Do not buy reviews and do not write them yourself. Beyond the fact that it is against the rules, it is also plainly visible: five reviews in one week, all four words long, all five stars. Two a month for a whole year is worth more than twenty in a week.
A perfect score is not the thing to aim at
We have heard buyers say more than once that a flawless score makes them suspicious. We are not going to invent a figure for it, but the remark comes back often enough to be worth passing on. A very good score with a couple of honest complaints in it reads as real.
The bad reviews also get read first: people are looking there for the shape of the problem, meaning what went wrong and what you did about it. A bad review is therefore not a wound. It is the only place in the whole listing where you get to show how you behave when something goes sideways.
The reply is written for the audience
A reply to a bad review is not written for the person who wrote it. They have already decided. The reply is written for the next person, the one standing outside the shop door, holding a phone and reading before they walk in.
What works: short, calm, one fact and one action. "Sorry, the order was late. Our supplier changed and we failed to keep you posted. We now call the moment a deadline moves." Three lines, and the next reader knows what would happen to them.
What kills you: length, sarcasm, "as we already explained to you at the time", and an argument about whether this person was ever a customer. You may be right in that argument, but the reader only sees a business arguing with a customer. Reply within a couple of days, to the good ones too, but do not paste the same sentence twenty times over.
What is not under your control
Distance decides a great deal and you cannot move it. A large share of who appears on the map is simply how far away the searcher happens to be standing. Someone four hundred metres from a competitor sees the competitor. There is no optimising your way out of geography.
From which it follows that "we are number one on the map" carries no content. Number one where? Two people on two different street corners see two different lists. If you want to measure where you stand, do it from the same spot every time, your own doorway for instance.
A stranger can edit your listing. Anybody can suggest a correction: an opening time, an address, even a note that the business has permanently closed. Most are honest mistakes, occasionally they are not. The only defence is looking regularly, because the notification does not always arrive.
The map block cannot be bought. Advertising can be bought and it is shown near the map, but it is labelled and it is a separate thing. Those three organic places have no price list.
From which follows the last thing worth knowing: if somebody promises you a fixed position on the map, they are selling you a thing that does not exist. They may be an honest person who has been told the same story themselves, but what they are promising is not theirs to give. The same rule applies on the ordinary search side. And the listing is only one row on the page a customer gets when they search your name: who put the other rows there is an article of its own.
How this fits together with the website
The listing and the website are not two competing projects. They are one set of facts in two places, and the machine compares them against each other. But the division of labour is clear: a listing has room for a name, a category, an opening time and a phone number, and no room for the question the customer actually has. Do you do this exact thing, what does it cost, how long does it take, do you come out to Polva. The website answers that.
Here is one concrete thing most listings get wrong: the link on the listing does not have to point at the home page. It should point at the page that answers that particular question. A plumber's listing that points at the emergency call-out page answers the customer's question immediately. A home page with a big picture and a slider on it asks them to go looking for the answer again.
And when the site says one thing and the listing says another, you have not only confused a machine. You have confused a person standing outside your locked door, reading on their phone that you are open.
The same division of labour applies to reviews. You do not choose the ones on the listing, which is precisely why they are believed more; you do choose the testimonials on your website, which is why they have to be specific enough that they could not have been invented. What makes a testimonial on your own site believable has an article of its own.
Ten minutes a month
A listing is not a project that gets finished. It drifts. But keeping it right is a short job if it is done regularly.
- Find yourself on your phone. Trading name and town. Does the listing appear, and is it yours?
- Opening hours. Are next month's exceptions in there?
- Category. Is it still the right one? You started out doing renovations and now you mostly build kitchens.
- Phone. Press the number inside the listing itself and let it ring. An old number happens more often than you would believe.
- New reviews. Answer them, the bad one first.
- Photos. Has anything appeared that you did not put there?
- Changes. Has anybody "corrected" something?
Put it in the calendar on repeat, because without a calendar entry it gets skipped in exactly the month when it would have mattered most.
Where to start
If there is no listing, that is tonight's job and it costs nothing. If the listing exists, the ten minute list above tells you whether it is true. In our experience almost every listing has something to fix, and it is usually the category.
The website side is separate work. The search engine audit is free and tells you where your site stands. If you would rather somebody worked through that list for you, that is what our search engine optimisation is for.
And if you get stuck somewhere, for instance the listing is sitting in a former marketing person's account and their phone does not answer, write to us. At that point it is usually faster to ask than to keep trying.
Frequently asked questions
When a listing simply does not appear, the cause is most often the primary category. The primary category is what the machine uses to decide which searches you are even considered for: a wrong one does not make you worse, it makes you invisible. A company that fits windows but is listed as a construction company comes up nowhere on a search for window fitting. The check takes four minutes: search for the word your customer says, open the listings that do come up on the map, and look at the category they carry.
The business listing costs nothing. You get no invoice for it and nobody rings you up to sell it: people ring about websites, people ring about advertising, nobody rings about the listing. That is exactly why it stays undone - a broken listing throws no error message and a wrong category sends you no letter, so you do not appear and have no way of knowing it. If you are a local business and both the listing and the website are broken, fix the listing first: the listing takes one evening, the website side is months of work.
Start by looking rather than creating: search your trading name and your town on your phone, because a listing may already exist without your knowing it. If there is an invitation to claim the business next to it, nobody is managing it - take it, then prove you really are that business, usually with a postcard carrying a code, which takes a week or two. If somebody else holds the listing, ring them and ask. Do not create a second listing: two of your business on the map splits your reviews between them.
A reply to a bad review is not written for the person who wrote it - they have already decided. It is written for the next person, the one standing outside the shop door and reading on their phone before they walk in. What works is short and calm, one fact and one action: what went wrong and what you now do differently. What kills you is length, sarcasm and an argument about whether this person was ever a customer - you may be right, but the reader only sees a business arguing with a customer.
No. The three organic places in the map block have no price list: advertising can be bought, but it is labelled and separate. A large share of who appears on the map is simply how far away the searcher happens to be standing, and there is no optimising your way out of geography. That is why "we are number one on the map" carries no content: two people on different street corners see two different lists. If somebody promises you a fixed position on the map, they are selling a thing that does not exist.
Read next
You type your web address from memory; you have never typed your own company name into Google. Your customer does, and does it last of all, just before calling. What meets them there: your site under a heading you did not choose, the state figures, a competitor advert, an old Facebook page. Who put each row there, what you can change, and how to run that search as a stranger.