- Waze Maps has 130 million monthly active users worldwide — 30 million in the US
- Waze is a community-based traffic and leverages user data and input for up to date traffic info.
- Waze Business Listings offers underutilized local visibility and ad reach.
- Google owns Waze, but they do not share data. Each app functions independently.
Why would Google own two apps to do pretty much the same thing? After all, Google Maps has long been the golden standard of navigation apps. However, Waze has a sizable user base of 130 million monthly active users worldwide — 30 million users in the US alone!
If you run a small business, that’s 30 million users you can’t ignore when you want to grow your customer base and get found on local search. Waze has many community and interactive user elements that many enjoy and help small businesses appear along routes.
This is an active and enthusiastic customer group your business should reach, and you must claim and optimize your Waze business listing to do that. Here’s our quick guide to the Waze app and Waze business listings and optimizing your business information on the platform.
What sets Waze apart
Waze is a community-based traffic and navigation app. It began as an independent open-sourced app and continues many of those behaviors, despite being owned by tech monolith Google.
Waze’s strongest feature is that it remains open-sourced and garners a community within its user-base. The app is continuously collecting information to adapt to the fastest route possible quickly. Users can “level up” by interacting with other users within the game-like app.
Other user-favorite features include letting users add friends to keep track of each other on road trips, pinging users if a friend appears within a Waze user’s area, and users can connect to Facebook and Google Calendar to quickly create events and directions.
And for business owners on Waze, the app offers community-recommended restaurants/businesses along the route as well as notifications for the lowest gas prices as you travel your directions.
With so many actively engaged Waze users, you need to make sure your Waze business listing is added and optimized, so people can find you and connect you to their community. Here’s how to go about adding your business to Waze.
Claim your Waze business listing
Step 1: Download Waze
Your first step to controlling your Waze business listing is downloading the Waze app for Android or iOS. This is a similar gateway as Google My Business – remember, Waze is owned by Google. It is likely that there’s already a Waze business listing set up for your business based on the extracted data from Google my Business. However, you still need to optimize it for Waze users.
Step 2: Go to reports – Places menu
Open up the Waze app, and create your login. On the bottom left corner of your screen, there’s an orange “reports” icon. Follow the menus and select the “Place” icon.
Step 3: Take a picture for your Waze business listing
When you click on the “Place” icon, your camera will automatically open. Waze requires that you take a picture of your storefront. Here’s a photoguide for Google My Business that can be really helpful for this. Once you take your live storefront picture, the shutter icon changes to double arrows. Click it to continue.
Step 4: Input your Waze business listing details
Enter your business details into Waze, starting with the name of your business. You can also label it as a residential location.
Continue to enter your business details and confirm the exact location of your business on the Waze map. Finally, choose the appropriate category labels for your business so Waze can bundle with similar companies.
Step 5: Review and confirm
Review your business information and confirm.
Update your Waze listing information
Unfortunately, your Waze business listings may end up getting lost in the cloud of interactive buttons and features on the app. However, those community features function more as secondary business drivers. Having up to date business information, great photos, and proper business classification are what you want more than anything. The community will flock to your business in time.
What’s next for Waze?
Waze’s largest appeal to its users is an interactive, live mapping experience. They cultivate a community of engaged users who want to interact and share to improve each other’s user-experience and drive. The goal of Waze is to be the most up-to-date and interactive directions app on the market, and it’s been successful in driving innovation that parent company Google can’t help but adopt Waze features unto its Google Maps platform.
It’s likely that Waze is here to stay and will continue to introduce innovative, user-friendly features. Features that make it an important local SEO tool for every business to utilize and reach millions of Waze users. If you’re worried your website and local SEO isn’t up to snuff, contact the experts at Redefine Marketing Group for more digital marketing, SEO, and web content help.
