When people ask this on the Product Experts forum, they usually mean one of three different situations:
- Some are having trouble verifying their listing on Google Maps.
- Others do not understand why they cannot see their business when they look straight at the map.
- In the third case they cannot find their business on the map by a keyword or the query they need.
I am not sure my business is verified, registered and present on Google Maps
While registering on the map it is worth studying carefullythe Google Maps publication rulesso that you comply with them and publish the business successfully.
You can alsocheck the statusof your business. The statuses are:
- Verified: the business is verified and published on Google Maps. It can be found by the query “your business name + address”.
- Processing: the business is being checked against the rules and prepared for publication. If the status stays for more than three days, you need tocontact supportto sort the situation out.
- Suspended: the business broke the publication rules and is not shown at the moment.
- Duplicate: the algorithm thinks your business already has a listing on Google Maps. Throughsupportyou can appeal this status or ask to merge your listings, if you can manage both of them.
- Verification required: the business has not passed verification in Google. You can do it in one of the ways offered to you.
I zoom in on Google Maps and cannot see my business
Google’s algorithms work so that at any given zoom level only a handful of places are shown. Most often these are the most visited places in the city: landmarks, large shopping centres, cafes or restaurants with heavy footfall. The system also shows the most visited places, or places it considers important specifically for you, if you allowed it to collect that data.
When you zoom in on the location you need, the same rule applies, but only for that particular location. You see the businesses the system picked for you. In the second screenshot you can notice that the businesses shown on the map differ from those listed among the businesses at this address.
This does not mean that you see every business at that address. It happens because a business on Google Maps has to be developed, and its visibility depends not only on what users do, such as leaving reviews or photos, but also on what the business itself does. Look at the next screenshot, where we pressed the “Show all” button at the bottom of the list.
That way we saw that there are in fact 16 businesses at this address. It means four of them are good enough to appear at the address at maximum zoom, and none of them is developed enough to appear on the general city view.
You can read about increasing your visibility in local search results in theguidelines.
Margin of error:
Keep in mind that when Google Maps collects data there is a margin of error that depends on the accuracy of the GPS transmitter in the user’s device. So people who come to a large shopping centre with many businesses inside will be recorded as visitors of one of the places within 100 square metres, provided they did not interact with a specific business in that centre. On Google Maps they may be shown as visitors of one business even though in reality that never happened.
Recommendations:
Honestly, looking for a fix for this is a waste of your time, because fewer than one hundredth of a percent of users look for businesses nearby by simply browsing the map.
In 99% of cases people look for a business by name if they already know it, by category (clothes shop) or by a keyword query (buy clothes in Kyiv) and so on. Which brings us smoothly to the third question.
I cannot find my business by a keyword query or a category
The Google Maps search algorithm analyses the data you provided in your business profile, on your website and across the internet, to work out information about your business, the quality and quantity of your content, and what other people share about you. This forms the internal ranking of your business for the keywords and links people use to find it. If you cannot find your business by the query or category you need, it means the work you have done is not enough.
Besides the guidelines mentioned above, it is worth paying attention to the following:
– Following the Google Maps publication rules
– A description of your services in the business profile
– Keeping your business data up to date
– Product descriptions in the profile where possible
– Good photos of your location, avoiding images that are not yours
– 360-degree panoramas
– Having a website, and its quality
– Information about your business on other sites
– Your social networks and their quality
– SEO optimisation