Setting up the business listings that matter beyond Google

1. 01

   Finish Google first

   A verified Google Business Profile is the prerequisite. It gives you the canonical name, address, phone, hours, categories, description and photographs, and Bing can pull directly from it rather than making you type everything twice.

2. 02

   Bing Places: search, claim, then import

   Sign in at the current Bing for business portal with the business's Microsoft account, and search the name and city before doing anything else. You will either find an auto generated listing to claim or nothing, in which case you add one. One listing per location, always.

   • Use the import from Google option where it is offered. It pulls name, address, phone, hours, categories, photographs and description across in minutes.
   • Decide about ongoing sync deliberately. Leaving it on means future Google changes flow through automatically, at the cost of overwriting anything edited only on Bing. For most businesses, on is the right answer.
   • Verify. Bing offers a code by email to the business domain, by phone, or by post depending on the listing. Nothing shows publicly until verification completes, so do not leave it half done.
   • Run Bing's own recommendation tool afterwards. It lists what is still missing, and imported categories and photographs do not always map across cleanly.
3. 03

   Apple: register, then verify against the clock

   Start from Apple's business portal and sign in with the business's own Apple Account. The first account to sign in becomes the administrator, so this genuinely has to be the business's account rather than whoever is helping. Agencies register separately as third party partners and are granted access.

   • Apple gives a limited window from registration to finish verification, so have the business licence or a utility bill ready before you start rather than after.
   • Verification is by phone, by document review, or by adding a DNS record to the website's domain. Phone is fastest where it is offered.
   • Then claim the place card rather than creating a new one. Claim it even when it looks correct, because an unclaimed card is built from third party data and will drift.
   • Complete the card to match Google exactly, and add the promotional showcase slot. Showcases expire, so put the refresh on a calendar or it will sit stale.

Record every login in the business's own password manager as you go, under the business's own accounts. A listing nobody can get into is functionally a listing somebody else owns.

Note the asymmetry in the consequence. On Google a breach tends to remove reviews and can restrict the profile, and you find out. On Yelp, its automated recommendation software moves reviews that look prompted into a not recommended section where they stop counting toward the star rating, and nobody tells you, so a business that asks enthusiastically can end up displaying a lower rating than one that never asked at all. Brief whoever handles customer follow up explicitly, because the instinct is to reuse the same message everywhere, and the single message naming both platforms is the most common breach there is. The full version of this, including the process that satisfies both at once, is in the Google and Yelp review rules guide.