We at Partoo wanted to help make your life easier by sharing some best practices with you. All Google Business Profile categories (both primary and secondary) are available on our interface. Our teams will take care of matching these categories with those that appear on other sites where we publish information, such as Tomtom, Facebook, Snapchat and Justàcoté. If your Google category is not available on a particular site, we will find the closest match.
Select a Google activity category
Categories are used to describe your establishment and what you do. They determine when your listing will appear in Internet users' search results. If, for example, your category is ‘Pizzeria’, Google is likely to display your establishment in searches for terms like ‘Restaurants’, ‘Italian restaurants’ or ‘Pizza’. Other sites have similar SEO methods.
The primary category also determines your ‘place label’ i.e. the icon that is displayed on the Google Maps map as shown below (as well as on Waze, Apple Maps and other GPSs on which Partoo publishes your information):
You will need to choose a primary category and secondary categories (up to 9) for each of your establishments. If you offer both boiler repair and air-conditioning repair services, you will need to choose your categories accordingly! The Darty example below shows how important it is to select lots of relevant categories in order to appear in various searches (kitchen designers, bedding, household appliances, etc.)
Tips on choosing your categories:
Choose a category that describes your establishment in general: if your establishment is a hospital that has a restaurant, do not add the ‘Restaurant’ category. It is up to the establishment itself to create its own listing with ‘Restaurant’ as the primary category. If, on the other hand, you offer several services, such as pharmacy and health & personal care, add both categories
Choose specific categories: if you select a specific category such as ‘Hotel resort with golf course’, Google will implicitly include more general categories such as ‘Resort’, ‘Hotel’ and ‘Golf course’.
The choice is yours, but you can't create your own category: the category list is already pretty long. Note also that Google is able to detect information relating to your categories by analyzing your website and any mentions relating to your establishment that appear on the web: Google will then automatically add them to your listing.