Search your business name in Google Maps right now.
If a listing comes up and you didn't create it, Google auto-generated it from public data. That listing is currently unmanaged. Anyone can suggest edits, customers add photos, Q&A fills up. It's making first impressions you have no control over.
If there's no listing at all, you're invisible to anyone searching for what you do in your area.
Go to business.google.com and sign in. Search your business name. If it appears, claim it. If it doesn't, create it. Google walks you through both. Either way you'll hit a verification step, usually a postcard mailed to your business address with a five-digit code. It arrives in five to fourteen days. Some accounts get phone or email verification instead, which is faster.
Once that code is entered, you own the listing. Everything from here builds on that.
— Brett