Your Google listing has a paragraph. Write it.

Search for a dentist in Navrangpura, a caterer in Bopal or a CA near Law Garden, and the first thing you see is often not a website. It is a map, a few listings and a panel with photos, hours, reviews and a phone number. Somewhere in that panel is a short paragraph written by the business itself.

That paragraph is the description, and it is the one part of the listing where you choose every word. Customers write the reviews, they add some of the photos, and Google fills in a good deal of the rest. This piece is about the part you control.

Who reads it, and when

The person reading your description has already searched, already found you, and is choosing between you and the listings just above and below. They are one tap from calling you, or one tap from going back.

That makes it a different job from a homepage, which has to explain you to someone who might be anywhere in their thinking. The description speaks to someone at the door. So it should answer what people ask at the door: what exactly do you do, for whom, where, and why here rather than next door.

The first sentence carries it

Google allows 750 characters, and plenty of people will read only the opening. Treat the first sentence as the whole description, the same way you would treat a homepage headline.

A useful first sentence says three things: what you do, for whom, and where. “Family dental clinic in Navrangpura, with evening appointments for people who can't leave work early” does all three, and the last part is a reason to choose it. “Welcome to our clinic, a leading name in dental excellence” does none of them, and it took the same number of words.

What goes in the rest

• What you offer, in the words people search with. “Root canals, braces, children's dentistry” rather than “comprehensive oral healthcare”. Nobody types the second one into Google. Meet them where they typed.
• Who it suits. Families, first-time founders, wholesale buyers, NRIs who come home in December. Naming them lets the right people recognise themselves and the wrong ones move on, which saves both of you a phone call.
• One fact the listing next to yours cannot claim. The same address since 1994. Parking for twenty cars. A doctor who has treated three generations of the same families. A fact does more work here than any adjective, because the reader can check it.
• The languages you work in, if it matters. In Gujarat it often does. A line saying you speak Gujarati, Hindi and English answers a question many callers are too polite to ask. If you are unsure which language the description itself should be in, this piece on Gujarati or English applies here too.

Write it for the person standing outside with their phone, deciding whether to walk in.

What to leave out

Google's own guidelines ask that the description carry no links and not lean on offers, sales or prices. The listing has posts for those, and they can be changed every week without touching the paragraph.

Leave out the keyword pile as well. “Best dentist Ahmedabad dental clinic near me dentist Navrangpura” reads like a spam message, because that is what it is. The words that help are the ones a person would actually say about you, used once, in a sentence.

And leave out the words that make every business on the map sound alike: trusted, quality, customer-centric, state of the art, one-stop. They are the local cousins of the nine words we have already asked brands to retire. Every listing in the panel claims them, so none of them gets to keep them.

Make it agree with everything else

Hours, phone numbers and holiday timings have their own fields in the listing. Keep them out of the paragraph, because the paragraph is the one place nobody remembers to update, and a description that says “open all seven days” under hours that say closed on Sunday makes a reader trust neither.

The description should also sound like your website, your WhatsApp messages and the person who answers the phone. A reader who finds a warm, plain paragraph on Google and then a stiff, formal homepage will notice the change, even if they could not say what it was.

A ten-minute rewrite

Search for your own category and area on your phone, not your own name, and read your description next to the listings around it. Then write it again in this order:

• One sentence: what you do, for whom, where.
• Two or three sentences: what you offer, in plain words.
• One sentence: the fact nobody nearby can claim.
• One sentence: who it suits, and the languages you work in.

Read it aloud. Count the characters. Check that the first sentence works on its own. Then put a reminder in your calendar for six months from now, because the business will have changed by then and the paragraph will not have noticed.

It is the shortest piece of writing most businesses own, and usually the least looked after. Ten careful minutes will make yours better than most of the listings on the map.