Claiming Local Listings


How to claim your local business listings

If you’re building and managing your local business listings manually, you’ll need to go through a claiming process for most of them.

Claiming a listing online verifies that you’re the owner of a valid business and are authorized to maintain its presence on the web. Each online local business index has its own claiming process with unique steps to verify your listing. We’ll provide a general picture of what you can expect to experience during the claiming process for most local business indexes.

  1. Most places will first ask whether your business already exists in their index. Don't be surprised if it does, even if you've never created a listing there! Unless your business opened its doors today, chances are there's some record of its existence on the web. A listing of your company may have resulted from the process via which data flows from one platform to another. In general, you'll be prompted to enter your business name or phone number to discover any existing listings.
  2. Next, you'll review any existing information, fix incorrect information, and provide any new or missing information about your business name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, and other details. Remember: You want your core business details (name, address, phone, website) to be as consistent as possible on every listing. This would be a good time to read our guide, The Core Components of Local Business Listings.
  3. Once you've filled out your business's information, you'll be asked to go through a verification process. This typically happens in one of five ways:
  • Via an immediate phone call, during which you'll verify using a pin number
  • Via a postal mail postcard and pin number verification
  • Via an email in which you'll be clicking on a verification link
  • Via a video recording
  • Via a live video chat

If you’re verifying via postcard, alert all staff members who retrieve mail to be on the lookout for the postcard. These typically arrive within a couple of weeks, but are rather plain and small. You don't want them to get lost! Check your mail carefully each day.

The time between completing verification and seeing your listing appear online varies widely from platform to platform. In some cases, your listing will be live in a matter of days or even minutes, but other indexes have a lengthy manual review process, meaning that it can take several months for your listing to be approved for publication. While you wait, don’t make any further changes to your submitted listings. This will help you avoid additional delays. Just be patient and check from time to time to see whether your listing is live.

In certain indexes (such as Google Business Profile), any future changes to core data such as the business name or phone number may trigger the need to re-verify. However, you can typically edit fields like business descriptions and photos without having to go through the verification process again.

How accurate are your local business listings?

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The dos and don’ts of claiming local listings

  1. Track manually managed listings in a spreadsheet. If you’re manually managing all of your local business listings, keep track of them in a detailed spreadsheet that includes dates submitted, email/password use, status, links, and anything else you need to know to quickly find the listing again whenever necessary.
  2. Only claim your listings under your business account — never a third-party account. While it’s fine to have a staff member or third-party consultant create and manage your listings for you, don’t enter into an arrangement in which someone is claiming your listings under any account other than the account of the business. For example, Jim’s Plumbing Co. shouldn’t authorize ABC Marketing, Inc. to claim the plumber’s Google Business Profile listing under [email protected]’s Google account. Should the relationship between the plumber and the agency end, Jim may find that he doesn’t control his local business listings and can’t manage them — a situation that should be avoided at all costs.
  3. Don’t confuse claiming with owning. While claiming validates that you have the right to manage a listing on a platform, you don’t own that listing — the platform owns it. They maintain the right to take the listing down if they feel it violates guidelines, to filter out reviews if they’re deemed untrustworthy, and to approve public/community edits to the listing’s data, all without the business owner’s approval. While this may not be ideal, it’s important to know that your listing on a third party’s platform is their content, not yours.
  4. Find automated services to save time. While manually claiming all your local business listings was the only option in the early days of local search, do be aware of timesaving modern alternatives. Now there are automated services that manage your local business listing data, providing solutions that remove the need to manually claim every single listing. Services such as Moz Local partner with listing platforms, distributing data to them rather than claiming each listing. Because the listings are not claimed, you’re still able to manually claim them later on, should you cancel the automated service. These automated solutions are valuable in that they establish and monitor the accuracy of your data all from a single dashboard and diminish or remove the need to manually claim a listing. They can also alert you to inaccurate or duplicate data that needs correcting.

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