Set Up Your Nextdoor Business Page The Right Way

Nextdoor Neighborhood

This article will help you set up your Nextdoor business page the right way. It also includes many tips in order to create your business page to be more effective and put the right content in that will help your business make a great first impression on Nextdoor.

If you set up your business page right, then it will tell potential customers about your business and give you a good jumping off point for getting recommendations. There’s no cost to set up a Nextdoor business page, but that’s not a good reason in itself to set it up.

Other social media profile are free too, such as Twitter and Facebook but that’s not a good reason to set them up. Only if you’re actually going to maintain the profile is there a good reason to have them. That’s not so with Nextdoor.

Learn how to market your business with Nextdoor and get a free recommendation request email template.

Become a Nextdoor marketing pro and get a free recommendation request email template.

For one thing, a Nextdoor business page doesn’t require you to constantly maintain it. Once you set it up, there are no messages to post (unless you want to), it won’t look stale, and it will continue to be relevant as long as the information on it is relevant. The only thing that will make it look stale is if you don’t have a lot of recent recommendations. So, the biggest maintenance requirement is that you regularly ask for recommendations.

But if you need some better reasons than that, continue reading before getting to how to set it up.

Why You Should Create A Nextdoor Business Page

It’s completely free!

So what? Why should you want to waste your time setting up your business page on yet another social media platform?

Because your neighbors love to recommend local businesses in Nextdoor. They do it on other platforms to a lesser extent, but other social media platforms aren’t based on location. Nextdoor is all about neighbors, local events, local businesses, and everything else local imaginable.

There’s an entire ecosystem of business referrals happening on Nextdoor right now. In fact, you could run your entire business strictly off of referrals from Nextdoor. Of course, we don’t recommend you do that because if Nextdoor ever changes anything then all your customer could be gone. It likely won’t happen, but you never know, best not to keep all your eggs in one basket.

When you set up your business page on Nextdoor then people recommending your business will be prompted to attach their recommendation to your business page. That means their recommendation will have a direct link to your business page AND it will show up on your page as a recommendation.

Nextdoor recommendation post
This was a post asking for vet recommendations. The business pages are attached to reach recommendations and the number of recommendations the business has are highlighted.

That’s a win-win!

While creating a business page on Nextdoor is free, advertising is not. But, you can’t advertise on Nextdoor unless you create a business page. If you want to advertise on Nextdoor, then creating your Nextdoor business page is the first step to doing that.

Follow these instructions for how to complete your Nextdoor business page and start getting recommendations, which in turn will help you reach more customers on Nextdoor.

How To Create Your Nextdoor Business Page

It used to be that the process of setting up a business page was different whether you were an individual (dog walker) or a business (operating under a business name).

That’s changed, though.

Here’s how you can create your free business page on Nextdoor. These instructions are in paragraph form, but the steps from each image are referred to in the paragraphs.

The first thing you need to do is to head over to the Nextdoor create a business page website. If you have a Nextdoor account and are logged into it, then you can select that account, and you’ll jump right to the next screen.

If you don’t have a Nextdoor account, or you’re not signed in, then you’ll see the form below. If you have a Nextdoor account, click the link at the bottom to log in. If you don’t, fill out the form and sign up for one!

I won’t point out each item you have to fill out because these don’t require too much though. The only one I will point out is that the email address (step 3) should be your business email address (i.e. name@loclweb.com) that goes directly to you rather than the general business email address (i.e. hi@loclweb.com).

Creating a business account on Nextdoor

Once you create your business account in order to create your business page, it’s time to create your business page!

To do that, enter your full and accurate business name (step 6) with nothing extra in it. Don’t add that you’re the #1 whatever or the best this or that. Keep it to just your business name, exactly as it’s registered. Then, click Next (step 7)!

First step in signing up for a Nextdoor business page.

Now it’s time to enter your business address (step 8). As you type the address field will attempt to autocomplete your address. That is, unless your address is new and doesn’t exist (I had this problem once). Even if you’re a service area business you are required to enter an address. If you are a service area business or don’t have a physical location, just enter your home.

If your business address isn’t an actual business, and you go to customers or work with them virtually (but locally) then select the Don’t show business address publicly. Then no one will ever see your business address, and you can live incognito without random people showing up. Now you can click Next (step 9).

Enter business address.

This is the last step before your initial (yet not completed) business page is created on Nextdoor. You can also change this information after your page is created.

First, enter the contact email address for your business (step 10) if you’d like. This email address doesn’t have to be your email address but could be a general business email address (i.e. hi@loclweb.com) but it’s completely optional.

Next up is your business phone number (step 11), which is not required either. And, another optional field is your business website (step 12).

Now for the required (and possibly the most important) field, your business categories (step 13). The first category you choose should be the most specific to your business industry. Try typing several things and Nextdoor will auto-suggest categories. Add as many categories as possible that are relevant to your business.

Enter Nextdoor business page public contact info and categories.

Below is what it looks like when you’ve clicked on the categories that pop up in the list. They will fill in below the category field.

There’s also an option for hide your page from search engines, but I’m not sure why you’d ever want to select that. If you have a specific reason, go ahead and do it, but otherwise, I highly recommend you DO NOT hide your page from search engines.

Now you can claim your page (step 14).

Choose as many business categories as possible that are still relevant.

Complete Your Nextdoor Business Page

No, you’re not done yet. Your page is claimed and created but not fully complete. You’ll be brought to your businesses’ management screen where you can do lots of things related to your business page (including getting recommendations and setting up ads).

But, you need to first finish setting up your business page by clicking on the Page tab (step 15).

Nextdoor Business management.

This is a preview of your current business page, which, as you can see, is extremely sparse. You’ll want to click the Edit button (step 16) to finish adding all the information about your business.

Nextdoor business page preview.

As you enter anything into your business page, Nextdoor saves it. So, while there’s no save button, but it’s saving as you go.

Here’s where you get to add all the good stuff about your business. First, make your Nextdoor business page really stand out by adding a logo (or your headshot) if you have a high-quality logo (step 17). It should ideally be at least 500px by 500px and a JPG or PNG format. If you need some help with image logistics, check out this article about the right image format to use for websites (yes, it’s about WordPress, but it applies to the internet in general).

Pretty much every image on Nextdoor (except the cover photo) should be square. If you upload a landscape format picture into the logo field, Nextdoor will crop at will, which could look pretty silly if you uploaded a headshot and your head gets cut off (ouch!).

The cover photo (step 18) can be a picture of your business location (if you have one), a picture of your business truck and you, or pretty much anything that represents your business professionally.

Nextdoor recommends your cover photo be at least 1156px by 650px, but they will accept anything as low as 578px by 325px, which is way too small in reality. Also, the image can’t be larger than 10 MB but no image should ever be that large anyway.

For some reason Nextdoor didn’t carry our email address, website, or phone number forward so be sure you check that (step 19, 20, and 21) and re-enter your email address if it’s not there. If you’re an HVAC contractor or in some sort of business that requires a license, be sure to enter that information also to further qualify yourself as a license professional.

The instructions for the last half of the image are below.

Editing a Nextdoor business page steps.

If you have hours then you can enter them (step 22) but they’re absolutely not required. Some of us never stop working after all!

If you do enter business hours, the editing screen is quite tedious and looks like this. No shortcuts by selecting that your business hours are the same every day of the week.

Nextdoor business page hours.

Your story is all about your business, including what makes you special, how you got started, and perhaps even what you do to benefit the community outside your business (step 23). Heck, it could even be a greeting! Nextdoor recommends you put a greeting and tell neighbors a bit about yourself. If a picture helps tell that story, then by all means, include a story image (step 24). The story photo should also be square.

Our story involves working in a dark room designing amazing websites, so we chose a story image that portrays that. Okay, maybe we don’t actually work in a dark room alone. We’re family people too and enjoy the company of other tech nerds.

The last step to making your Nextdoor business page super awesome! Upload additional photos (step 25) that represent your business. This could be your work, your location, you, you with your favorite neighbors (as long as you have their permission to post them) or anything else you like that shows your business.

There doesn’t seem to be a limitation on how many images you can upload in the gallery but if you figure out if there is, let us know. Nextdoor doesn’t publish any limitations, and we have 10 in there and can still add more. So, the limit is higher than 10!

One thing about the images… Once you upload an image, add a description to it by clicking on the edit button. That will help give context to each image, and also I’m sure help for ranking in Nextdoor at least minimally.

I’m not sure what the partner permission option is, but I’d just ignore it. Even Nextdoor doesn’t have any information about that anywhere that we found. What partners!?

Here’s what we did in the edit screen. Now you can click the Preview button at the very top (lots of scrolling!)

Information entered in Nextdoor business page.

That’s it! Once you make all those changes, your business page is complete and already saved. That’s because Nextdoor has been saving it as you make changes to the page.

A Completed Nextdoor Business Page

Once you’re in the preview screen you can see what others see when they look at your Nextdoor business page. The page we created for this example was pretty ugly, admittedly. But, check out the real Loclweb Nextdoor business page to see what a good one looks like.

Nextdoor business page preview.

Share Your New Nextdoor Business Page

Once you create your Nextdoor business page, it’s completely live on Nextdoor. It may not show up immediately in search on Nextdoor, but it will soon. You can start getting recommendations to make your business page look superb, though.

Learn how to market your business with Nextdoor and get a free recommendation request email template.

Become a Nextdoor marketing pro and get a free recommendation request email template.

You can always share your page or the recommendations link anywhere on Nextdoor or outside Nextdoor (Facebook, Twitter, your website, email, etc.). Nextdoor even recommends you introduce your business. Once you’ve verified your business, you can post up to 2 posts on Nextdoor. Nextdoor even shares a great template that you can use to introduce your business. Just be sure to adhere to the Nextdoor business post guidelines.

We like the template Nextdoor provides in this article for posting your first business post. Here’s how you can get your business page recommendation address/URL and also the business page address/URL.

Don’t judge us from our lack of recommendations because we just created our business page a few days ago but here’s how you can get your URL. First click on the Your Reputation tab (step 1). Then click the Share page button (step 2).

Now you can choose any of the buttons, but our preference is to always use the Copy link option (step 3). Why? Because then we are in full control over the sharing process, but that’s just my personal preference.

How to get Nextdoor business page address/URL.

When you click the Copy link button, the recommend URL will be saved to your clipboard. It will look something like this.

https://nextdoor.com/pages/loclweb-lincoln-ca/recommend/

Please, go right ahead and leave us a recommendation! We absolutely won’t stop you.

Now, if you’d like to simply link directly to your Nextdoor business page rather than sending people to the screen with the recommendations popup, simply remove the recommend/ from the end of the URL.

Then you end up with this.

https://nextdoor.com/pages/loclweb-lincoln-ca/

Conclusion

Your Nextdoor business page is a powerful resource for new customers. As long as you put some effort into getting recommendations regularly, then it will pay off as another great resource for customers. Make it a goal to get your first 5 recommendations and then after that, get at least one recommendation a month.

Potential customers will be able to find you on Nextdoor and your current customers can recommend your business on Nextdoor. The best part is now that you have your business page, when your customer recommends your business. Nextdoor will prompt them to also link their recommendation to your business page.

That makes it super easy for potential customers to learn more about your business, visit your awesome website (you have one right!?), and even contact you.

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