Optimizing Google My Business: Claiming & Verifying Your Business

If they notice that you’re on Google My Business that legitimizes, that you are an actual business and that you’re requesting this for, for good reason. So the first thing that we need to do is we actually need to claim the business, our business, through Google My Business. And first thing that I would do here is actually head out to Google and do a quick Google search, very similar to this one, right here, with Chick-fil-A. What I’m going to look for is this area right here, this knowledge panel, this is all information that’s provided from your Google My Business profile. If you see this on the right hand side here, it is very likely at some point in time, there was a profile that was created, whether you have the email, uh, I mean, if you still have the email credentials for that specific profile, that’s awesome.

Just pop open, log into that. If you don’t, there is an easy way for us to request ownership for the one that’s actually created already. We want to do that for a couple of different reasons. One, we want to try to avoid, creating a duplicate location and confusing Google. If there are two locations or there are there two profiles that are for the same business for the same address that can cause Google to get a little confused and can cause you some issues in terms of suspensions of the profiles and what have you. The other reason that we want to try to request ownership over just creating something new is these reviews. So as you see here, this Chick-fil-A has 978 Google reviews for this location only, these reviews in terms of prominence really play a heavy role in the, the local search results that, that Google will put in front of a user.

So we want to try to maintain those as best as we can and the best way to do that is requesting ownership of that specific profile. So, in order to do that, we’re going to jump over to Google My Business, if you have a business, or if that knowledge panel doesn’t show up, just go ahead and fill out this information here, follow the prompts to set up the profile quickly and easily. It’s not optimized by any means, but at least it’ll get set up. If you do see that, go ahead and start typing in the name of the business. It’s very likely that you’ll end up seeing it down here in this list. If that’s the case, go ahead and click on these links here, it’ll shoot you to another page where there will be a link for you to request ownership of that.

It’ll take about 72 hours to complete this process. What Google is going to do is it’s going to send an email out to that old email account that you may or may not have the credentials to, if there’s no response to that email, or no action is taken on an email, Google will open up that profile for you to go back in and manage it. Again, it takes about 72 hours, but I’ve done it a few times, with some of the clients that we serve and, I’ve not had any sort of issues. The next step once we’ve claimed our business and we’ve created a profile, is actually verifying that profile. There are a couple of different ways that we can do that. Google will verify some locations based on phone numbers.

So, if you have a physical location and are really well known, they’ll call the location. They’ll give you a code. All you need to do is put that code into the verified section and you’ll be verified and be eligible to show up on Google searches and the Google maps for your specific location. There is another way of doing it. It’s a little bit longer, where Google will actually send a postcard out to your physical address. And in that piece of mail, it’ll have the Google verification code that you jump back in here and enter. And again, once you do that, you’re verified with Google and are eligible to show up for local search results. Once all of that is taken care of, then you can jump in here and, and start actually optimizing the profile.

We’re going to take a deeper dive into all of these different sections, in the coming videos. So if you have any other questions in the meantime, feel free to reach out to us. If there are any other platforms that you guys want us to take a deeper dive into and show you how to optimize them, feel free to leave those in the comments below. We’ll go ahead and we’ll take a look at them and we’ll start creating some content around that. If you’re liking these videos feel free to hit that like button and then subscribe to our channel. We’re going to be doing a lot more things like this. So yeah, that’s it for today. Uh, we’ll see you down the road. Thanks guys.