How to Set up a Google My Business Listing

In this video, I’m gonna show you how to set up a GMB listing. So a Google My business listing for your website. So, however, before you start this video and start setting up a listing, please do double check if you have a listing already for your business, because if you do, what are you gonna do? You’re gonna have a duplicate listing and it’s gonna cause more harm than good. So please check out my previous video and see if you have a listing first. If you don’t, then please follow these steps to set up one. So simply google, Google my business setup and you wanna click the top result, which should be this one.

And you wanna click at manage now. For some reason Google do not call this sign up or set up, they call manage now, but anyway you wanna click manage now, they’re both are the same thing. The button there and there. Now we’re gonna do is type in your business name. So I already have a GMB listing set up for LevelFinish. So you can see LevelFinish already has a Google My business listing. So what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna create another one, but I’m going to spell it a little bit different. So, I want to go for LevlFinish like that. And what I’ll do, I should delete this after the video because I don’t obviously want to duplicate listing.

So once you type in your business name, you wanna click here, ‘create a business with this name.’ What’s the name of your business? Which is what I just typed in now. LevlFinish, just make sure it’s all correct. And then click next. Choose a category that fits your business best. So this is what we call the primary category. So it’s the main thing your business does. So for example, for LevelFinish, I know we have different types of a flooring we install, so we’ve got hardwood, carpet, laminate. However, the main service we do is actually, or mainly actually provide is actually, is flooring services. So, I wanna type in flooring and see what comes up.

So I’ve typed in flooring and I’ve got flooring store, I’ve got flooring contractor. So the best suited one to me, it’s gonna be flooring contractor, which is exactly how I have it on my homepage as well. So you can see my homepage also optimize for this category. So I put in flooring contractor and then click next. Now you have the opportunity to add in more services. So this is where I kinda break it out and go for the actual service I offer. So I’ve got hardwood, carpet, laminate, towel, and vinyl. So I would put it in– Install flooring is actually an option there. So that’s fine. You can add a custom service. So I can put in carpet installation.

I’ll copy that cause I’ll need that again. I add another service. I’ll do hardwood floor installation. I’m gonna put in laminate installation and I’ve gotta put in tile installation. And the last one you have is a vinyl installation. So literally all of the services that we offer on the website. So, these are called your secondary category. So, the kind of sub categories of your main ones. So, I’ve told Google, “Hey, I’m a flooring contractor. I install floors. And these are the type of floors I install.” So simply prepare this, so suitable for your business and then click next. Now people are gonna ask you, do you want customers to visit your location, eg, a store or an office.

So this is all up to you, really. For example, with LevelFinish, we install flooring in people’s homes. We actually install flooring in people’s homes. No one needs to come to ask because we don’t actually sell any hardware, we don’t sell carpet. So for me in this instance, what I’ll do, I will click no. However, if you do have a physical location, like a shop and people come to your premises all the time, you might wanna click yes and then click next and then put in a location of your actual store. This will help people find you. So, if you put in, yes, I’ll show you what it does. So for example, with LevelFinish, you can see my addresses on show.

This is because I put in an actual address for people to visit. However, the company below us Rosson and Young inc, you can see they have no address there, so they’ve actually clicked no for this and they’ve hidden their address from people. So these people do not– They did not want customer visiting their kind of property, their business location. They’ve hidden it from the users. So this is kind of up to you. For me in this instance, I’ll just click no, cause I’ve done yes already for the first listing.

Where do you serve your customers? This is optional. So again, as I’m based in Richmond in Virginia. As you can see from my first address, I’m also gonna put down at my local city, which is gonna be Richmond. So I’ll type in Richmond. Make sure I’ve got the right one. I don’t wanna go for any of these ones down here. I want Virginia, USA. And then when I click next,

what contact details do you want to show to customers? So this is gonna be the details on the listing. So, this will be the phone number you see here and the website you have on the listing. So if I just go for say this site, for example, Better Floors. You can see they’ve got a phone number right here. So this is the phone number on display. And then when you click website, it should actually link to the website. So you wanna put the right website in there just to make sure people are going to the right website and not someone else’s. So for this one, I’ll put in any phone number for now.

In fact, I’ll just take the one of LevelFinish and change the last digit, just for the training purposes. So I’ll put that number there and I’ll change that three to one, for example. The website URL, if I just put in LevelFinish, I’ll change our website and put a little dash in there just for now. Just to make sure that’s not a real website before I do that.

It is actually a real website. Okay. So let’s go for,

Level like that. So I spell it wrong. Hopefully it shouldn’t be a real website. It’s not, so okay. I’ll put that down. Obviously you wanna put in your right details. I’m just doing this for the training purposes and then you wanna click next

and then you wanna click finish. So what you’ve just done now, you’ve created a listing. However you need to verify to Google. You’re actually based where you say you are. It’s gonna ask you to enter a mailing address. So, what you can do is put in the address of your business. Obviously I won’t do this now. I already have one for LevelFinish. And what you’re gonna do is when you’re filling information, Google gonna send you a postcard in the post. It should arrive within three to five working days. On that postcard, it’s gonna have a five digit pin or a four digit pin. I’m pretty sure they changed it recently.

And what you’re gonna do, is log into your account and actually adding that pin and that will verify your account. So if I click in verify later, for example, cause I don’t have that pin. I’ll show you what it’ll say. It’ll say verification needed. So, right now it my GMB listing will not be on show to anyone until I verify it because Google needs to make sure I’m actually based there where I say I am because a lot of people have fake addresses and they have loads of these fake listings and they just generate phone calls and doesn’t actually help anyone. So, we gonna make sure it should verify it. If I show you up here. Info.

You’ll see it says your edits won’t appear on Google until you verify your business. So, what you gonna do is obviously verify this, put it in an address. Once you do that, it will say a postcard is on the way to you and it’ll give you an option up here to say verify now and we do click verify now. You simply need to edit in the postcode or the little four-digit or five-digit code Google sent to you. And that is how you set up a Google My business listing for your website.