There are listings about you right now that you've never seen.

There is very likely already a listing. Google creates them automatically from other sources, and customers can add them too. Creating a second one is the single most common way businesses end up with a duplicate.

Watch out: Search the way a customer would, and also search your phone number. A listing under a slightly different name won't come up if you only search the exact name.

If you find it, there will be an option to say it's yours. If somebody else has already claimed it — a past employee, an agency you no longer use, a marketing company that did it without asking — there is a process to request access from whoever holds it.

Watch out: If the current owner doesn't respond within a week you can usually escalate and take it over. Don't give up and make a new one, which leaves you with two.

Get the postcard or video verification moving before you fill anything in, because everything else can be done while you wait.

The primary category does more than any other single field. Pick the one your customers would use, not the most accurate technical description. Then add secondary categories for the other things you do.

Watch out: "Restaurant" is worth less than "Cuban restaurant" plus "Breakfast restaurant" plus "Coffee shop". Each specific one is a separate way to be found.

Regular hours, plus special hours for holidays. If you close early on a Sunday or open late on a Monday, that belongs here — it is what feeds the 'open now' answer.

Watch out: Holiday hours are the ones nobody sets, and the ones that cost the most: somebody drives over on a bank holiday and finds you shut.

Say what you do, where, and what makes you the obvious choice. It's a few hundred characters — treat it like the two lines you'd say on the phone.

Listings with photos get meaningfully more attention than listings without. The exterior, the interior, the product, the people. Add a few every month rather than twenty once.

A reply is written for everyone who reads it afterwards, not for the reviewer. Going back and calmly answering a two-year-old complaint changes what a stranger takes away from it.

Search your name, then your phone number, then your street. Businesses that have moved or renamed often have two.

It must match the name on your sign, your website and your search profile exactly. Not 'and' on one and '&' on another. This consistency is what lets the listings reinforce each other instead of looking like different businesses.

Watch out: Remove things like 'LLC' if they aren't on your sign. The rule is: match what a customer sees in the real world.

Takeaway, delivery, parking, accessibility, outdoor seating, card payments. These look like small boxes but they are the filters people narrow by. Leaving them blank removes you from those results.

Watch out: Price range blank is the quiet one — on a lot of searches the listing simply doesn't appear once someone filters by price.

Same photos as your search profile. Same hours. One source of truth, typed in three places.

Do this after everything else, when you're not annoyed. Short, factual, no excuses, and an offer to sort it offline. You are writing for the next reader.

Watch out: Nobody can delete a real review — not us, not an agency, not anyone charging you for it. Anything promising otherwise is selling you something that does not exist.

Open Maps on an iPhone and search for yourself. Whatever you see is what your customers see, and it may be years out of date or in the wrong place.

The single most valuable correction here is the map pin. If it sits on the wrong side of the building or at the back of a car park, people arrive somewhere else and blame you.

Watch out: Check the pin, not just the address. The address can be right and the pin wrong.

Same content as everywhere else. This is a copy-and-paste job once the first listing is done properly.

Unofficial pages get created automatically from check-ins. They look real to customers and nobody is reading the messages sent to them.

Watch out: This is the one that quietly loses enquiries: people message a page nobody owns, get no reply, and conclude you're rude or closed.

Hours, address, phone, and the button at the top — make it Call or Book, whichever is the thing you actually want people to do.

An unanswered message is worse than no messaging. If you won't check it daily, switch it off and leave the phone number as the way in.

Watch out: Response-time badges are public. A page showing 'typically replies in a day' is advertising a wait.

There is normally an option to pull everything across from your Google listing. Do that once the Google one is correct, and this becomes a five-minute job.

Watch out: Do it in that order. Importing a half-finished listing just copies the gaps.