Resources
The steps, in order, with the rules attached.
Procedures rather than theory. Each one takes a single piece of marketing setup, states what the platform's own documentation requires, and walks the steps in the order that avoids having to redo them. Free to read, nothing gated.
What is the difference between a VIS Mountain guide and a resource?
A guide explains how something works so you can decide whether to do it. A resource assumes you have decided and walks the steps, quoting the platform's own rules where they matter.
There are five resources on this site: Google Business Profile setup, wider business listings setup, who should own your marketing accounts, the review rules at Google and Yelp, and white label delivery for agencies.
All of them are free to read without registration, and every platform rule quoted links to the vendor's own documentation rather than to a summary of it.
Written to be followed, not admired.
The test we hold these to is whether somebody with no marketing background can open one, work through it, and finish with the thing actually set up correctly.
Most published setup advice fails that test in the same two ways. It skips the step where the platform asks for something you do not have to hand, so you stop halfway and never come back. And it describes the interface as it looked when the article was written, which for these platforms is rarely the interface you are looking at.
Read the full breakdown: Written to be followed, not admired.Hide the full breakdown: Written to be followed, not admired.
So these are written against the vendors' own current documentation, and where a rule matters the rule is quoted and linked rather than paraphrased. Paraphrasing is how the Yelp review policy ended up being reported backwards across most of the marketing web: the summary sounded reasonable, and the underlying sentence says the opposite.
They also say when a step does not apply to you. A service area business does not do the same profile setup as a business with a storefront, and a practice bound by patient privacy rules cannot respond to a review the way a restaurant can. Pretending otherwise produces a document that is technically complete and practically useless.
Five documents, and who each one is for.
They stand alone, so start with whichever matches the thing in front of you. Where one depends on another having been done first, it says so at the top.
White Label Marketing for Agencies
For agencies and consultants reselling delivery rather than businesses buying it. How the working relationship is structured, where the reporting line sits, and what stays in your name in front of your client.
Read the guideGoogle Business Profile Setup Guide
The one to do first if your business has an address or a service area. Covers verification, the categories that actually affect what you rank for, and the fields most profiles leave empty for years without anyone noticing.
Read the guideBusiness Listings Setup Guide
What to claim after Google, and in what order. Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, Yelp, Nextdoor and the rest, with the ones that feed other systems marked so you are not working alphabetically.
Read the guideWho Should Own Your Marketing Accounts
Settle this before you hire anyone, including us. Which accounts must be in the business's own name, which roles to grant instead of handing over a password, and what to do if an old agency still holds the keys.
Read the guideGoogle and Yelp Review Rules
The two platforms take opposite positions and most published summaries get one of them wrong. Google publishes a request link. Yelp tells you not to ask at all. Both enforce it, and the penalties differ.
Read the guideDeciding, doing, and checking one fact.
Three different jobs, and picking the wrong one is why people give up on marketing content. If you are mid-task, a long-form guide is the wrong shape of help.
| You are | Read | Because |
|---|---|---|
| Deciding whether to do something at all | A guide | It covers the whole topic end to end, including the reasons not to bother |
| Doing it, with the platform open in another tab | A resource | It is a numbered procedure with the platform's own requirements quoted inline |
| Checking one specific fact | An answer | It settles a single question in a couple of minutes and links out to the rest |
The three layers cross-reference each other in both directions, so moving between them costs nothing. Every resource on this page links up to the guide that explains the topic behind it, and the guides link back down here when the next step is a procedure.
The things that stall a setup halfway through.
Gathering these first turns most of these procedures into a single sitting rather than three interrupted ones.
- An email address on the business's own domain, not a personal one and not a departed employee's
- Access to that mailbox and to the business phone, because verification goes to one or the other
- The exact legal and trading names, and a decision about which one the public sees
- The address exactly as it appears on something official, including the suite or unit
- Opening hours you will actually keep, plus the holiday exceptions
- Whoever at the business can approve publishing something in the company's name
- A note of any account an old agency or a former employee may still control
The last one is the expensive one. Recovering an account somebody else owns is a support process measured in weeks, and it is far easier to start it now than on the day you need the account.
The order that avoids rework.
Each step produces something the next one needs, which is the only reason to do them in any particular sequence.
Settle ownership first
Decide, in writing, which accounts sit in the business's own name before anything is created. Doing this afterwards means migrating accounts rather than creating them, and some platforms make that considerably harder than others.
Then the Google Business Profile
It is the profile most likely to be read, and verification can take time that runs in the background while you do everything else. Getting the categories right here also settles wording you will reuse on every other listing.
Then the wider listings
Apple, Microsoft and the rest, using the name, address and hours you just fixed. Doing this second means you are copying one agreed record rather than reconciling several slightly different ones later.
Then the review policy
Once profiles exist, people can leave reviews on them, and the two largest platforms want opposite behaviour from you. Read that one before anybody on the team starts asking customers for anything.
If profiles already exist and you are inheriting them, run the same order as an audit instead: confirm ownership, then correct the profile, then reconcile the other listings against it.
One record, copied outward.
The reason these procedures insist on fixing the details once, before anything is published anywhere.
Search engines assemble their picture of a business from many sources at once, and disagreement between those sources is a problem you create for yourself for free. A suite number on one listing and not another, a tracking number in one place and the real line in another, two spellings of the same street: each is small, and together they make a business look less certain than its competitor down the road.
Fixing it later is harder than it sounds, because some platforms feed others. Correcting the visible listing does not always correct the record upstream that keeps repopulating it, which is why the listings resource marks which sources feed which.
None of this is exotic work. It is clerical, it is finite, and it is the part almost nobody does properly, which is exactly why doing it properly is worth something.
These are complete enough to use without us.
That is deliberate, and it is the same position the guides take. Somebody who works through these and ends up with their own profiles set up correctly has had the intended outcome, and a meaningful number of people do exactly that.
What an agency adds is not secret knowledge. It is the hours, the specialists across each discipline, and somebody whose job it is to notice when something that was working stops working. None of that is needed to claim a profile or to write an accurate set of opening hours.
If you would rather not do it at all, the free audit checks the same things against your actual business and tells you which of them is currently wrong, ranked by what it is costing you.
Want this checked rather than done from scratch?
A free audit runs these checks against your real profiles and listings, and reports what is missing. No obligation either way.
Straight answers.
How is a resource different from a guide?
A guide explains a topic end to end so you can decide whether to act on it. A resource assumes the decision is made and gives you the procedure, with the platform's own requirements quoted where they matter.
If you are reading with the platform open in another tab, you want a resource. If you are deciding whether to open the tab at all, you want a guide.
Do I need to read these in order?
Only if you are setting up a business from nothing, in which case the order on this page avoids having to redo work. Otherwise each one stands alone and says at the top if it depends on something else being done first.
Are these free, and is anything gated?
Free, and nothing is gated. No email address, no download, no registration. Content that asks for your contact details before it will tell you anything is a lead capture form rather than a resource.
Why do you quote the platforms' own wording instead of summarising it?
Because the summaries are frequently wrong, and confidently so. Yelp's position on asking customers for reviews is the clearest example: the platform's own sentence tells businesses not to ask anyone at all, and a large amount of published marketing advice says the opposite.
Quoting the operative sentence and linking to it lets you check us, and it means the page is still useful when a platform changes its policy and we have not caught up yet.
Can I follow these without hiring an agency?
Yes. They are written to be completed by somebody with no marketing background, and finishing one without ever contacting us is the intended outcome rather than a failure of the page.
How current are these?
Each page carries the date it was last reviewed, and the links go to the vendors' live documentation rather than to an archived copy. These platforms change their interfaces often, so where a step depends on a specific button we describe what it does rather than only where it sits.
Where this comes from.
Primary documentation and published research behind the guidance on this page.
- Google Business Profile Help: Guidelines for representing your business on Google (opens in a new tab)The rules that decide whether a profile stays live, including business name accuracy.
- Google Business Profile Help: Add or claim your Business Profile (opens in a new tab)
- Apple: Apple Business Connect (opens in a new tab)Where a business claims the place card that feeds Apple Maps, Siri and Spotlight.
- Microsoft: Bing Places for Business (opens in a new tab)The current portal. Microsoft relaunched it in 2025 and older bingplaces.com guides are out of date.
- Yelp: Content Guidelines (opens in a new tab)Under conflicts of interest: businesses should never ask customers to write reviews. Also bans AI written reviews.
- Google: Maps user generated content policy, prohibited and restricted content (opens in a new tab)The primary text. Fake Engagement and Rating Manipulation are where the review rules actually live.
Talk to the team
A short call, a look at how the business currently shows up, and a straight answer on what we would do first.