Part of my week at the city guide involves talking to the businesses we list; restaurants, bars, the odd independent shop. Lately the same question keeps landing in my inbox. Why does one place show up in Google with a map pin, photos and a row of reviews, while the venue two doors down is nowhere to be seen?
The short answer is Google Places, and most small businesses are getting it wrong through no fault of their own. Nobody posts them a memo when the rules change.
Google renamed the Local Business Center to Places last year, and then in October it merged local results into the main search page. So a properly claimed, properly filled-in Places page now turns up in that blended block of local listings near the top. Ignore it and you are handing that spot to a competitor who has done ten minutes of admin you haven’t.
Here is what I tell people to check, in the order I’d do it:
- Claim the listing. Nearly every business already has a Places page, generated automatically from directory data. You verify ownership with a PIN that Google posts to your address on a physical postcard. Yes, an actual postcard. It takes a fortnight and it is the single most skipped step.
- Make your name, address and phone number identical everywhere. Your own site, Yell, Thomson Local, your Facebook page. Google reads all of it and gets nervous when the details don’t match. “Ltd” on one, nothing on another, an old landline on a third; that inconsistency does real damage.
- Pick the right categories. Be specific. “Italian restaurant” beats “restaurant” beats “food”.
- Add photos. The listings with a decent photo of the front of the shop get clicked. The ones with a grey placeholder do not.
- Ask for reviews. Politely, from real customers. Don’t invent them; Google’s review filter is unpredictable and the fake ones tend to vanish anyway, sometimes taking the genuine ones with them.
The bit that surprises owners is how little of this is clever marketing. It is mostly tidying up after the web, which over the years has scattered three slightly wrong versions of your address across a dozen directories.
I’ll be straight about the reviews, because it is the part people fixate on. Google’s system for them is a mess. Reviews get filtered for reasons nobody can explain, competitors leave malicious ones, and there is no proper way to appeal. I don’t have a fix for that, only a suggestion to keep asking happy customers and let volume do the work.
Half the businesses I speak to don’t know they have a Places page at all. It was built from old directory data and has been sitting there unclaimed, with a phone number that belonged to the previous owner.
