Beat the spammers, scammers and unscrupulous competitors from claiming your legitimate business listing!

Google is pulling data for local business listings from places like phone directories (yellowpages, superpages, etc.) and other sources. Once these listings show up, they are “unverified” and business owners can and should claim your listing. Once you have gone through the verification process with Google you can edit and refine your listing.

These are the Canadian instructions on how to do this from Google. You can also add your business if you’re not showing up yet, which is highly recommended!

Here’s the starting place for the US, UK and Australia.

Claiming your listing and using a strong password can stop someone else from claiming your listing. Unfortunately, there are a lot of reports of unclaimed listings being falsely claimed by others.

Below is an unclaimed listing. It’s hard to tell the difference from a claimed listing.

The advantage to the business owner to claim this would be to fill all the information out completely- there are sections for descriptions, reviews and categories; hours of operation; pictures and videos; even coupons.

Then get it optimized and be rewarded by higher local search rankings, more traffic and ultimately more profits.