Guide
Book through your Google Business Profile
Set up your Google profile with your home address off it, your towns as its service area, and your page as its website and its booking link — one step at a time, in Google's own words.
People look for a notary on Google, and your Business Profile is what they find there. Settings → Integrations → Google Business Profile walks you through setting it up so that it sends them to your page — and keeps your home address off it. Hand & Seal never signs in to Google or changes your profile: you do each step in Google, and the set-up checks what it can from its side.
Start with your page. The first step checks your page as the public sees it: published, open to anyone, shown as a notary's page (a current commission on file), and with your town. Anything marked says where to put it right.
Say whether you have a profile. Not yet, one Google shows but you've never managed, or one you can edit.
Add it, or claim it. The step gives Google's own steps — business.google.com/add to add one, or Claim this business in Google Maps — and what to answer when Google asks.
Let Google check it's yours. Google chooses how: a call or text, an email, a video or a postcard. By video, keep your journal closed: its pages hold your signers' details.
Keep your home address off it. In Google, Edit profile → Location, then turn off Show business address to customers. Your profile then shows the towns you go to.
Add the towns you go to. The step lists the towns within your travel miles in the states you're commissioned in — your own first, if it is in one of them, then the towns of 2,500 people or more, nearest first — up to the 20 Google takes.
Put your page in as your website. Copy the link the step gives you into Website. It uses your own web address when you have one connected (Settings → Web address), and your Hand & Seal page otherwise.
Make your page your booking link. A second link, for Booking, opens the same page.
Good to know
- How the last two steps tick themselves: each link carries a code of its own. Press Website or the booking button on your profile, and once your page has opened in a browser the step says so, with the time. That's all the set-up can see — it never sees your profile itself.
- Everything else is what you told it. Where it stands, at the end, a ✓ is what the set-up checked for itself, and the rest is what you said, with the day.
- Google reviews each change, usually within minutes and sometimes up to 30 days. Leave and come back any time: the set-up opens at the step you were on.
- Changed your page's address? If the links you put in Google no longer reach your page — your page's address here changed, or your own web address isn't connected any more — the set-up says so on the steps that give the links and where it stands, and gives you both new links to put in Google. Once you say they're in, each link waits for its first visit again. Your own web address, while it's connected, keeps working whatever your page's address here is.
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