This is the third of our Jaipur brand notes. For a business with a physical address, the listing shown on Google Search and Maps is often the first page of the brand a customer sees. It is also one of the cheapest pieces of marketing to improve.
Name, address and phone: identical everywhere
The business name on the listing should be your real name, spelled as it appears on the board, with no keywords added. The address and phone number should match the website and your social pages exactly. When details disagree across the web, customers lose trust and search systems lose confidence in which one is true.
Choose the right category
The primary category tells Google what you are. Choose the one that most precisely describes what customers come for, and add secondary categories only where they are true. A wrong category sends the wrong people and hides you from the right ones.
Photographs people can believe
Show the outside of the shop as someone would find it, the inside, the products and the team. Real, well-lit photographs beat polished stock. A customer standing on the road with a phone is trying to match what they see to what you showed them, so use the images that make that easy.
Hours, holidays and special days
Wrong hours are the quickest way to lose a visitor. Check them against your actual routine, including festival and market-day changes, and update the listing before the day. Hours shown on the listing, the website and the WhatsApp profile should agree.
Write the description like a person
Use the description to say what you do, who you serve and what makes you worth the trip, in plain sentences. It is not a place to repeat a list of keywords. Read it aloud, and keep it consistent with the tone of your website.
Reviews: ask, read, answer
Ask satisfied customers to leave a review while the experience is fresh, and make it easy with a short link. Read every review, answer them politely, and never invent or buy them. How a business replies to a complaint is often read more closely than the complaint.
A listing that connects to the rest
Link the listing to the website, to the right landing page for the service, and to WhatsApp. The same name, logo and colours should greet the customer on Google, on the board and on the phone. That sameness is what a brand identity is for, and getting the listing found is part of performance marketing. For the shopfront itself, read our note on signboards.
If you would like help with the name, the category, the photographs and the description in one go, you can ask us for a free brand audit and we will check the listing against the rest of the brand.
