Claim your Google Map listing

The purpose of this article is to give you all the information you need to claim your Google Places listing for your business.  If either of the following are true, then you need to 'claim' your listing:

• When you go to Google Maps and look up your business, it is not there; or
• When you click on your business within Google Maps, a link above the top-right corner of the map asks if you're the "Business Owner?".

Please call us if you are interested in learning how to claim your own Google map. Its a great way to give clients directions to your business. It can also help with search results by letting Google know where you are geographically.

To follow this article and claim your 'Place' is not difficult, and the exact process is described step by step below.  In total, most people would be able to complete the operation in under an hour. However, please remember that this is something we can do for you, for free, as part of our basic web hosting package.

Why do you care?

Increasingly, your clients are trying to find you using map-based search services; a pin on a map is just so much easier than trawling a long text list. This is especially the case with smart-phones, which now account for more searches than traditional mediums. So part of this is simply about making sure you’re in the running and listed correctly when potential customers are looking for businesses like yours, in your area.

But there is a further reason: When a potential client runs a standard search within Google, the search engine uses a wide variety of factors to determine what websites should be listed near the top of its search results. And yes, you guessed it: Having your business correctly listed and ‘claimed’ by you within Google Places contributes to how high your business is listed in the search results. So even if geographical location is not central to the way you do business, being listed correctly will still increase your number of incoming enquiries.

The good news.

This problem is easy to fix, and you don’t need half a day and lots of caffeine to make it so:

1. Set up a Google account if you haven’t already; we’d strongly recommend you use an email address that has your business name in it (such as This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) rather than a generic one - again, this will achieve higher search results, because the Google search engine factors in (almost) everything!
2. From within Google Maps, run a search for your business.
3. ‘Claim’ your business (or create it from scratch if it's not there), which will initiate a verification process - you'll need to receive a phone call giving you a PIN, or possibly a postcard through the mail so that Google can confirm that you are who you claim to be.
4. Once verified as the business owner, log back in, and update everything you possibly can - your website links, email addresses, blurb, phone numbers, and so on.

You'll have to check back in a day or so to make sure it's all worked out the way it should have, and then you're done - congratulations!

Want us to do it for you?

This, along with a whole suite of similar ‘smarts’, is all part of our web services with the additional benefit of having us watch your back for things like your Google Maps listing.

If you'd like to just get on with what you do best and have someone else take care of the technology, then that's where we come in; we’re humans, we like our technology a lot, and we’re good at taming it on your behalf.

We produce good looking, contemporary, functional websites at a competitive price, but we extend our service towards making sure that your whole electronic strategy is bringing you every possible click and phone call.

Feel free to call us for a no obligation chat about what you're after, and what we might be able to do for you.