Most business owners we speak to have a Google Business Profile set up. Someone has claimed it, added the opening hours, maybe uploaded a few photos, and it quietly does its job in Google Search and Google Maps. That’s the right place to start, and for most businesses it still brings in the bulk of local enquiries.
What’s easy to miss is that Google isn’t the only place a listing for your business can appear. Apple Maps and Bing both show business information too, and if nobody has claimed those listings, the details shown may have come from third-party data sources rather than from you. That can mean old opening hours, a previous phone number, or an address from before you moved.
Google first, but Apple and Bing are worth the half hour
This isn’t a case of Google no longer being enough. Google should still get most of your attention, and if you only ever look after one listing, make it that one.
The argument for Apple and Bing is simpler than that. You have already gathered the information: name, address, phone number, opening hours, website, a logo, a handful of decent photos. Adding the same details to two more free platforms takes a fraction of the time the first one did. Both are also far less crowded than Google, because plenty of businesses have never got round to them.
There’s a practical angle too. Anyone using an iPhone who asks Siri for directions, taps an address in Messages, or searches in Apple Maps is seeing Apple’s data, not Google’s. That’s a reasonable number of people in any local market.
Claiming your Apple Maps business listing with Apple Business Connect
Apple Business Connect is Apple’s free tool for claiming and managing what Apple calls a place card. That place card is what people see across Apple Maps, Messages, Wallet, Siri and other Apple apps. You’ll need an Apple Account to sign in, and Apple verifies that you actually represent the business before handing over control.
Once you’re verified, you can manage the details yourself: opening hours, phone number, website address, photos and your logo. You can also correct the pin if it’s dropped in the wrong spot, which happens more often than you’d expect on rural roads and in business parks.
Before that point, Apple may be relying on third-party data sources for your listing. Those sources are not always wrong, but they are not always current either. Claiming the listing is how you stop guessing about what’s being shown.
Bing Places for Business, and the shortcut from Google
Bing Places for Business is Microsoft’s equivalent, covering Bing Search and Bing Maps. It was relaunched in October 2025 and now lives at bing.com/forbusiness.
The handy part is that Bing can import an existing Google Business Profile. Your name, hours and contact details carry straight over, which makes it the quickest route by a distance. Do check the result rather than assuming it came across perfectly, and fill in anything the import left blank, particularly photos, services and your business description.
There’s a second reason Bing is getting more attention than it used to. Bing Places data is reported to feed local results in Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft’s AI assistant. Sources differ on how directly that works, so we wouldn’t build a strategy around it, but it’s a fair bonus for a listing that takes a few minutes to claim.
Consistency matters more than volume
Having three listings only helps if they agree with each other. Search engines and AI tools cross-reference business information from multiple sources, and conflicting details make it harder for them to treat your information as reliable. More importantly, a customer who rings an old number doesn’t care which platform sent them there.
So keep these the same across Google, Apple and Bing:
- Business name, written exactly the same way each time
- Address and the position of the map pin
- Phone number
- Opening hours, including bank holidays and seasonal changes
- Website address
If you change any one of those, change it in all three places while you’re thinking about it. That single habit avoids most of the problems we come across.
The order we’d work through it
- Search for your business in Apple Maps and on Bing to see what’s already showing.
- Claim the existing listing, or create one if there isn’t anything there.
- Complete Apple’s verification step so you have proper control of the place card.
- On Bing, import from Google if you can, then check the imported details line by line.
- Add photos and your logo, and fill in every field rather than the minimum.
- Put a reminder in the diary to review all three listings a couple of times a year.
How we handle this for clients
For clients on our SEO services, local listings are part of the ongoing work rather than a one-off task. We claim and verify the Google, Apple and Bing listings, work from one agreed set of details so all three match, and use the same photography and logo files across each so the business looks like itself wherever it turns up.
We keep a record of what’s on each listing, which makes updates straightforward later. When a client changes their hours or moves premises, we update all three together rather than finding the old address still sitting on Apple Maps a year later. Having built and looked after websites for businesses across Northern Ireland since 1999 from our base in Coleraine, we’ve seen how often that kind of detail drifts once nobody is watching it.
A small job that keeps paying off
Apple Business Connect and Bing Places are free, quick and genuinely useful, especially while plenty of local competitors have left them untouched. None of this replaces the work you’ve already put into Google. It just means the information people find is yours, and it’s right, whichever map they happen to open.
If you’re not sure what your Apple Maps and Bing listings currently say, get in touch and we’ll check them and sort the setup for you.