Apple Maps: how to claim and optimize your business listings

So, how to be more visible to you clients? The answer is to thoroughly manage your online presence and reputation to rank better, be ahead of competitors using all possible sources and being on all relevant digital services. And therefore attract more clients to your company's locations.

One of the way to increase your company's visibility for users in digital world is to be present on each popular digital platform. While your focus is on location-industry giants like Google and Facebook as well as narrow-specific location-based or review sites for your niche, Apple Maps was stated to have 23+ million active users over the last year.

So, being on Apple Maps, your business gets additional opportunity to acquire new audience — apple users — and conquer their loyalty. Of course, Google is the leader-platform for search. Nevertheless, Apple Maps develop its services and has a huge customer base. So, ignoring this audience would be a a huge mistake.

In this post, we collected all the useful information for you to start (or continue) working with your business's locations on Apple Maps and optimize your listing to be visible for customers.

It is a kind of base where you can find and edit your business listing. Just go to Places on Maps and sign in there with your Apple ID.

Enter in the search the name/address of you listing and find out whether it exists. If it does, you can claim it and add all the necessary information. Next, Apple should send a letter confirming or rejecting your application. You need to wait about 5 working days.

Also Apple can verify the information by calling the phone number provided or sending official document that shows your place's name and address.

If your place still doesn't exist, tap 'add new place' and add all the necessary data about your company to the suggested fields.

When you've claimed or added your place on Apple Maps, you can make edits to make your location eye-catching, comprehensive and attractive. Make sure that the information you provide is accurate and relevant. Include links to your website and social media to engage your customers.

Once you've entered all information and added the links, it's time to check and confirm you are the owner of the Apple Maps Business Listing. Submit your listing for a review by Apple Maps. If some extra information is required Apple Maps will contact you to get it. Usually, it also takes about 5 working days to wait.

Now your company is on Apple Maps. Congratulations! What should you next to get the maximum result from your presence on this location-based service? Right, you need to optimize and work with it. When your business listing ranked high, customers are more likely to click on it and get familiar with your place, products and services.

Now, let's get down to some pieces of advise to make your presence on Apple Maps more efficient.

Apple Maps are very proud that they provide users only with accurate data. So, your listing must contain only truthful information about your company, which should be updated in time if you don't want to lose customers.

Today, Apple Maps is beta-testing a new convenient and different from other location-based services rating system, which will momentally indicate whether your business is worth your attention. 5-star rating system goes away, and stays visible only from other platforms (e.g. Yelp, TripAdviser, etc.). Customers now can give businesses "Thumbs up" or "Thumbs down" with the percentage indicator to understand how many people rate a place. Also Apple gives users the opportunity to rate subcategories like "Products" or "Services".

It seems unusual, cause we all are used to classic Google reviews and rating, but still Apple Maps stand out, and it may be even more convenient to see recommendations when you have only a minute to decide whether to visit a nearby place. Also, it can be tiresome to read reviews and try to identify weather it is a really good place. Meanwhile, to mark a place with "I recommend" button needs a conscious decision from a user to advise the place and its evaluation as a very good one. Thereby, new rating system may seem to be a good idea and become something to fight for.

Nevertheless, reviews are crucial for any business and have the weight, cause they are the source of your business credibility and trust from customers. As Apple Maps aggregate reviews from other services like Yelp, TripAdvisor and others, you should pay thorough attention to generating positive reviews on those platforms. It strengthens your positions in digital world and improve ranking. So, motivate your customers to write positive feedback about your company.

As we've already said, Apple Maps pull data from other services where people leave reviews about your business. Keyword optimization is an important thing to focus on if you want to be higher in search. Use the right keywords while responding to customer reviews so the platform shows the best of them.

Voice search is getting more and more popular. According to the recent study, 58% of US consumers searched for local businesses via smartphone, 74% of users search for local businesses at least weekly and 76% of users search for local businesses at least once a week, most of them do it daily via smart speakers.

What it is if not a sign to optimize your listing for it? Here, we share how you can do it.

If your company's listing is comprehensive and fully filled out, you have high chances that Siri will recommend your business in local search results.

Apple Maps gain more and more users and develop very quickly. Today, we see they test new features, tomorrow we'll see your customers began to use them. So it is very important for any business to up-tp-date on such a fast-growing platform.

If you have several locations it won't be hard for you to claim and optimize your business listings on Apple Maps yourself. But if your company has 10+ locations it may seem quiet time-consuming to manage all the processes. In this case you can always turn to such platforms as BrandWizard and get all the processes of creating, updating and managing automated!