Google Listings for a Business Inside Another Business

Two businesses, one front door

A sushi counter inside a grocery store. A stylist renting a chair in someone else's salon. An accountant in a shared office building. A trainer working from a room at the back of a clinic.

Each is a real business with its own customers, and each sits inside a place with someone else's name on the sign outside.

A customer searching for the smaller business often finds the bigger one, or a pin on the map that points at the host's front door. They walk in, ask the first person they see, and get a blank look.

A listing that makes the location clear fixes most of that before the customer leaves home.

Who this applies to

• Counters and kiosks inside grocery stores, markets and malls.
• Chairs and rooms rented in salons, spas and clinics.
• Offices in shared buildings and business centres.
• Cafes inside bookshops, garden centres and galleries.
• Services with their own counter inside a larger store.

The second is where confusion runs deepest. The renter and the host often share a street address, a waiting area and sometimes a phone line, so Google and customers alike have little to tell them apart.

What Google expects of a listing

In general terms, Google's guidelines allow a separate listing for a distinct business that meets customers at that address during the hours it shows.

The listing should carry the name the business actually trades under, as shown on its sign and paperwork, with nothing added. It should have its own category, its own phone number and its own hours.

A business that only borrows an address now and then, with no regular presence, does not qualify. Pretending otherwise risks the listing being removed.

Naming it properly

Use your own name, exactly as it appears on your door or counter sign.

Adding the host's name to yours, as in your name followed by "at" and the grocery store's, blurs the two businesses in search results.

Unless it genuinely forms part of the name on your sign, it also goes against Google's rules on names.

Leave out keywords and the neighbourhood too. A listing under its real name, with the right category, is easier for Google to keep separate from its host.

The address and the pin

Use the street address you share with the host. If the building gives you a unit or suite number, put it on the second address line.

Then check where the pin sits on the map. Google My Business lets you move it, so place it on the entrance your customers actually use, which may be a side door rather than the host's main one.

When Google sends the verification postcard, it goes to the host's address. Warn whoever sorts the host's mail, or it may be thrown out with the flyers.

A worked example

A personal trainer rents a studio room at the back of a physiotherapy clinic in a row of shops. Clients can use the clinic's front entrance or a side door beside her room.

Her listing used the clinic's street address with no unit, her pin sat on top of the clinic's, and the phone number was the clinic's main line, because that was the number on her business cards at the time.

New clients phoned the clinic's front desk, asked for her by name and were offered physiotherapy appointments. Some arrived and waited in the clinic's queue. A review about the clinic's parking landed on her listing.

Nothing in her listing distinguished her from the business around her.

She switched the number to her own mobile, added the room number the landlord uses, moved her pin to the side door, and added photographs of that door and her studio.

Her website's contact page now walks clients from the parking lot to her room, and her booking confirmations repeat the same directions.

Directions inside

Listings have no field for a description, so the walk from the street to your counter has to be explained elsewhere.

The website is the main place. A location page should say which entrance to use, what to walk past, what your sign looks like and whether to check in with the host's staff.

Photographs on the listing do the same job visually: the building, the entrance, the route inside and your own sign, in that order.

Since August, listings have also carried questions and answers. If someone asks how to find you, answer there, where the next customer will see it too.

Keeping the two listings apart

Two listings at one address with similar names, a shared phone number or the same category can look to Google like duplicates. One of them may then be filtered out of results.

Distinct names, distinct phone numbers and accurate categories are what keep them separate.

If reviews meant for the host land on your listing, reply politely and point the reviewer to the right business. A short word with the host's front desk about directing your customers helps more than any listing setting.

Hours and the phone

Show only the hours you are actually there. A stylist who rents a chair three days a week should not inherit the salon's six-day hours.

Use a number that reaches you, not the host's main line. If you share a reception desk by arrangement, make sure its staff know your name and how to reach you.

Set holiday hours separately from the host's. You may close when they open, or the other way round.

The counter-case

A practitioner who works entirely by appointment, books through the host and is happy to be found through the host's listing may not need a listing of their own yet.

Even then, the website should say exactly where to go once inside, and the host's staff should know the name.

Anyone who wants to be found by their own name needs their own listing: their own name, number, hours and category, with the shared address made unmistakable.

The setup

1. Use the name on your own sign.
2. Add your unit number on the second line.
3. Move the pin to the entrance customers use.
4. Use your own number and your own hours.
5. Photograph the route from street to counter.
6. Write a location page with directions inside.
7. Tell the host's staff about the verification postcard.

Step four does the most to keep the businesses apart. A shared phone number is what most often sends your customers to someone else's desk and makes two listings look like one.

Getting a customer from a printed sign to the right page is covered in iPhones now read QR codes with the camera.

Frequently asked questions

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