The Business Description Is Back on Google Listings

The paragraph that came back

Google My Business has brought back the business description this month: a field where you describe the business in your own words, shown on your listing to anyone who looks you up.

Listings used to carry a description, lost it some time ago, and now have one again.

It holds up to 750 characters, a short paragraph of a little over a hundred words. You will find it under Info in the dashboard, and it appears on the listing as a passage from the business itself.

Almost everything else on a listing is assembled by Google from your categories, reviews, photographs and questions answered by strangers. This is the one part you write.

What belongs in it

• What you do, in the words customers use to ask for it.
• Who it is for, such as homeowners, restaurants or property managers.
• Where you work, named as towns or neighbourhoods in a sentence.
• What sets you apart, stated as a fact someone could check.
• How long you have done it, as a year rather than an adjective.
• How people start, whether that is a call, a visit or a booking.

The fourth is where most descriptions go wrong. Quality workmanship and friendly service are claims every competitor makes; a specialism, a qualification or a written guarantee is a difference.

What the guidelines rule out

The description comes with guidelines, and they are stricter than many owners expect.

No links or web addresses. No prices, sales or special offers, which belong in Posts, the part of the listing built for anything with a date on it.

Nothing misleading or offensive, and no gimmicky characters such as rows of symbols.

Google reviews descriptions, so a new one can take a few days to show, and one that breaks the rules may never appear. A plain, factual paragraph has nothing to fear.

The first sentence does most of the work

People reading a listing on a phone decide quickly, and many read only the opening line before moving on to the reviews or tapping to call.

So the first sentence should carry the whole answer: what you do, and for whom. Everything after it is supporting detail.

Compare "A family business proudly serving the community since 1994" with "We repair and replace garage doors and openers for homes in Langley, Surrey and Abbotsford."

The first tells a stranger nothing. The second answers the question they arrived with.

Write it for the reader, not for ranking

The temptation is to fill the field with search phrases: every service, every town, each repeated in slightly different words.

Google says local results are decided mainly by relevance, distance and prominence. A clear description may help it understand what you do; a list of phrases helps with none of the three, and it reads badly.

The description's real job is persuading the person who has already found you. A paragraph that reads like a keyword list tells that person the business writes for machines.

Make it agree with the website

The description is a summary, and the website is the full version. They should say the same things.

If the website lists five services and the description mentions two others, or the listing says since 2003 while the about page says over twenty years, a careful reader notices.

Mismatches usually come from age rather than carelessness. Either way, the reader cannot tell which is current.

Use the same name, the same service area and the same words for your main services in both places. Search engines compare what different sources say about a business, so agreement helps there too.

A worked example

A glassblowing studio in a converted barn outside Nelson has its Google listing under the category art gallery.

Much of its work is beginner classes and commissioned lighting for homes and restaurants.

People searching for glassblowing classes found the listing, saw a photograph of vases on gallery shelves, and assumed they had found a shop. Some phoned to ask whether visitors could try blowing glass at all.

The owner's first draft opened with years in the craft and a line about quality. The version that went live opens: "We teach glassblowing, make lighting to order and sell our own glass from our studio gallery outside Nelson."

The next sentences describe the beginner classes, the kinds of lighting it makes and how far it delivers. The home page now opens with the same sentence, so the two agree.

The category is unchanged. Someone wanting a class who reads the listing now knows in one line that they are in the right place.

What to leave out

Your phone number, address, hours and website already have their own fields, and repeating them spends characters on nothing.

Leave out comparisons with competitors, claims to be the best or the cheapest, and anything you could not back up if a customer asked.

Leave out anything that changes often, such as this season's staff, a current promotion or a holiday closure. Those go out of date in the one place nobody remembers to check.

Who should write it

The owner usually knows best what the business does and for whom, and often writes the least readable version of it.

A good approach is for the owner to list the facts, and for someone who writes for a living, or whoever maintains your website, to turn them into four plain sentences.

Keep the final text with your other listing details, so it can be reused for Bing Places and your Facebook page's about section, and reread it whenever the business changes what it does.

The counter-case

The description is not the most important part of a listing.

Correct categories, accurate hours, real photographs and a steady flow of reviews do more, and a business missing those should start there.

A business whose name already says exactly what it does, in the one town it serves, gains less from a description than one with a broad category or an unusual mix of work.

Even so, it is one short paragraph, written once, in the only part of the listing that is yours. Write it plainly, and keep it in step with the website.

This week

1. Open Google My Business and find the Info section.
2. List what you do, for whom and where.
3. Write the first sentence as the whole answer.
4. Compare it with your home page and about page.
5. Remove links, prices and offers.
6. Search for your business a few days later.
7. Save the text with your other listing details.

Step four is the one that keeps paying. A description that agrees with the website reinforces it, and when the business changes, both get updated together rather than one being forgotten.

Keeping the other maps your customers use in step with this listing is covered in your business on Apple Maps.

Frequently asked questions

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