Google Is Free. Most Zimbabwean Businesses Aren’t Using It Properly.
Search “salon in Avondale” on Google. Most of them have claimed their profile. A few have photos and reviews. The rest have a name, an address, and nothing else.
Those few are getting the calls. Google holds 94% of Zimbabwe’s search market. Your customers are on it. The question is whether you show up when they look.
Why this is worth your time.
The frustrating thing is that fixing this costs nothing. A complete Google Business Profile gets 7x more clicks than an incomplete one. Profiles with photos get 42% more direction requests. Businesses with accurate hours are 96% more likely to be visited by someone who finds them online. And 76% of people who find a local business on Google visit it within 24 hours.
Most Zimbabwean businesses have either never claimed their listing or claimed it years ago and forgotten about it. Here is what actually needs to happen.
First, claim what’s yours.
Go to business.google.com and claim your listing. Until you do this, you don’t control what customers see when they search for you. Someone else may have added your business with a wrong number or wrong address. That information is sitting there, visible to anyone who searches for you, and you cannot change it until you claim the profile.
Then fill it in properly.
Once you have access, fill in every field. Name, address, phone, hours, description, category. The category field matters more than most people realize. It is one of the main factors Google uses to decide whether to show you in local results. If you run a hair salon and you have filed under “beauty supply store,” you will not appear when someone searches for salons nearby.
Take ten photos on your phone this week. Your space, your products, your team. Real ones. Profiles with photos get 42% more direction requests than profiles without. The average claimed business profile has fewer than one photo, which means ten puts you ahead of most local competitors before you have done anything else.
Add photos this week.
Ask for reviews in person.
Ask your customers for reviews, in person, directly. Not a WhatsApp broadcast. A real ask from you to someone who just had a good experience. Birdeye’s 2025 research found that each review a business receives drives an average of 80 more website visits, 63 more direction requests, and 16 more phone calls. Reviews also do something the numbers don’t capture: they are the first thing a stranger uses to decide whether to trust you over the business next to you.
Post something. Anything. Once a month.
Post an update once a month. A new product, a changed price, an offer, anything. Listings with recent activity get 21% more interactions than inactive ones, and Google pushes dead profiles down the results.
Most of your competitors in Harare probably haven’t done any of this. Search your category and your suburb right now. Whoever claims that space first keeps it.
