Putting your location on your website is three jobs, and the embed code is the last of them. First, claim your Google Business Profile and get the address right, because that is where your pin lives. Second, move the pin to the door your customers actually walk through. Third, put the map on the page, using the route inside Google Maps that needs no API key at all: Menu, then Share or embed map, then Embed a map, then Copy HTML. That third step is the quick one; the two before it are what make it correct. The order matters, because a map built from a wrong pin shows the wrong door on every page you paste it into, and nothing in the embed code can correct it.
The rest of this page is those three steps, then the four questions that follow them: whether you need an API key, whether it costs anything, whether the map helps your ranking, and whether it slows your site down. The last one carries a real cost, and it is the one to read if you read only one.
Google’s own pages were checked on 20 September 2026. Where a quotation, a figure or a menu name comes from one of them, the page is named beside it.
Text version
Three jobs, in this order.
- First: the Business Profile. Claim it. Get the address right.
- Second: the pin. Move it to the door customers use.
- Third: the map. Embed it where it helps, not where it slows.
The embed code is the last step, not the first.
Your Business Profile holds the pin. Your website only shows it.
These are two different things, and mixing them up is what sends people round in circles.
Your Google Business Profile is the record of your business inside Google. It holds your name, your address, your opening hours and the pin on the map. It is what a customer sees when they search for you on Google or open Google Maps. Google’s own help page puts the purpose plainly: “To help customers find your business on Maps and Search, add your business address on your Business Profile.” It also warns that the address you enter is not private: “The address on your Business Profile is public.”
The map on your own website is a window onto that record. It is a small frame, called an iframe, that loads Google’s map inside your page. An iframe is simply a box on your page that displays another website’s content. It has no settings of its own about where your business is. It reads the location from Google, so whatever Google holds is what your visitors get.
That is the whole reason for the order. If you paste the embed code first and fix the profile later, you will be back to redo the embed. If you fix the profile first, the embed is a five minute job you do once.
Step 1: claim the Business Profile and get the address right
If you have never claimed your profile, that is the first task, because until you do, you cannot change anything on it. Search for your own business name in Google and look for the option to claim or manage the listing. Google asks you to verify that the business is yours before it hands you the controls.
Then check the address itself. Google’s guidance for this step is short and worth taking literally: “To verify your business, enter a business address that Google can find.” An address Google cannot resolve is where wrong pins start, and that sentence is Google warning you about it.
One Singapore point belongs here, and we come back to it at the end. The address on your ACRA filing and the address your customer needs are often not the same address, and ACRA says so itself: your registered office “does not have to be the same place where you run your business activities”. Put the address customers visit on the profile, even when your company paperwork carries another one.
Step 2: move the pin to the door your customers use
The pin and the address are separate settings. A correct address can still put the pin in the middle of a building, on a service road, or on the wrong side of a block. You move it by hand, in the profile, and Google’s instructions are these five steps.
- Go to your Business Profile.
- Select Edit profile, then Location.
- Next to “Business location”, select Edit.
- To adjust your pin location, select Adjust, then move the map so the pin points to your business location.
- Select Done, then Save.
Google’s own wording for what you are aiming at is “move the map so the pin points to your business location”. Our advice to our own clients is narrower than that, and it is judgment rather than a rule from Google: point it at the door people walk through, not at the centre of the building. For a shop on a main road those are the same spot. For a unit inside an industrial block they are two very different walks.
If your business sits inside another business, a shop inside a mall for instance, there is a second setting worth using. Google says that in that case “you can request to have this info shown in your profile”, which puts the host building on the listing instead of leaving customers to work it out.
Step 3: put the map on the page, with no API key
This is the part everyone searches for, and for most small businesses it needs no key, no account and no card. You do it inside Google Maps itself, and the route is short.
- Open Google Maps on a computer and go to the part of the map you want to show.
- At the top left, click Menu.
- Click Share or embed map.
- Click Embed a map, then Copy HTML.
- Paste that HTML into your page where you want the map to appear.
Those first four steps are Google’s own, from its help page on sharing a map. What you get back is one block of HTML beginning with <iframe. On WordPress, paste it into a Custom HTML block, or the editor will show you the code instead of the map. Site builders usually have an equivalent block named “embed”, “HTML” or “code”.
Two things worth doing while you are in there. Put the map on the page where the address already is, usually the contact page. Where the contact details sit is one of the build decisions we cover in what to weigh up when you build a website in Singapore. And write the address out as text beside it, in normal copy that a person can copy and paste into their own phone. The map is a picture of the location. The text is the part that survives when the map does not load.
Do you need an API key, and does an embedded map cost anything?
For a single map of your own address, no key and no card. An API key is a code that tells Google which account a request belongs to, so it can count the usage. The route in step 3 is the whole job, and Google’s instructions for it are four clicks that never once mention a key or an account.
There is a second, different route, and that one does need a key. It is called the Maps Embed API, and it is for maps you want to control from code: showing directions between two points, opening on Street View, or displaying search results on the map. Google lists five modes for it: “place”, “view”, “directions”, “streetview” and “search”. On that route the rule is absolute. Google states the rule twice on the same page. First: “An API key is required for all Maps Embed API requests.” Then again as a reminder: “To use the Maps Embed API, you must include an API key with all API requests.”
The confusing part is that the keyed route is also free, and still asks you for a billing account. Google’s pricing page for the Maps Embed API says “Maps Embed usage is available at no charge”, and that “there are no short-term (queries per second) or long-term (queries per day) limits”. So the map itself costs nothing however busy your site gets. But Google’s own setup guide for the same product lists step 1 as “Account and billing”, whose whole instruction is “Ensure that you meet the prerequisites”, before you can enable the API or make a key. Free to use, and still a Google Cloud account with billing details attached.
The two routes get blurred together, and that is worth untangling before you start, because a business showing one address on a contact page never needs the keyed one.
| Share, then Embed a map | Maps Embed API | |
|---|---|---|
| Where you do it | Inside Google Maps, in the browser | In the Google Cloud console, then in your page’s code |
| API key | Not mentioned anywhere in Google’s four step instruction | “An API key is required for all Maps Embed API requests” |
| Billing account | Not asked for in Google’s instruction | Step 1 of Google’s own setup guide, before anything else |
| Cost of the map | No payment step anywhere in the instruction | “Available at no charge”, with no daily or per second limits |
| What it can show | The map view you are looking at | Five modes: place, view, directions, streetview, search |
| Who it is for | A business showing one address on a contact page | A site that needs directions or search built into the map |
Does a map on your website help your local ranking?
Treat it as a service to the customer, not as an SEO move. The pages we read on this subject all said or implied that embedding a map lifts your local ranking. Not one of them cited anything for it. We are not going to assert the opposite either, because we have no source for that. Here is what we can show you instead.
Google’s own documentation for the Maps Embed API, which is the page where a ranking benefit would be worth advertising, does not mention search ranking at all. It describes what the product does, what it costs and what the licence allows, and stops there.
What Google does publish about local ranking, it publishes for the Business Profile, which is the other half of step 1 and step 2 above. That is the system the ranking work happens in, and we have written up what actually moves it in what moves your Google Maps ranking in Singapore, including one tactic Google is in the middle of removing. If you came here for the ranking question rather than the map, that is the page to read.
The map on your site is still worth having. It is there so a person standing on the street with a phone can see which building to walk into. That is a good enough reason on its own.
Does a Google Maps embed slow your website down?
Yes, it can, and by default it does its loading at the worst moment. A map embed is third party content: your page has to go and fetch a live, interactive map from Google’s servers before the reader sees the page finished. Google’s own guidance on this pattern is blunt about the default behaviour: “The default approach is to load third-party resources as soon as the page loads, but this can unnecessarily slow the page load.” How much it costs your particular page is something only your page can tell you, which is what the check at the end of this piece is for.
This matters because Google measures how fast your page feels to real visitors, through three numbers called Core Web Vitals, and it publishes the line between good and poor for each. Google judges a page by the visit sitting at the edge of its slowest quarter, which it calls the 75th percentile. Three visits in four have to be at or under the number for the page to count as good.
- Largest Contentful Paint (how long before the biggest thing on the screen appears), “good” threshold (Google, checked September 2026)
- 2500 ms or less
- Interaction to Next Paint (how long before the page answers a tap), “good” threshold (Google, checked September 2026)
- 200 ms or less
- Cumulative Layout Shift (how much the page jumps about while it loads), “good” threshold (Google, checked September 2026)
- 0.1 or less
The fix has a name, and it is not lazy loading. Adding loading="lazy" to the iframe helps, but it does not stop the browser fetching the map well before anyone scrolls near it. The pattern that does is called a facade. Google’s definition: “A facade is a static element that looks similar to the embedded third-party, but is not functional and therefore much less taxing on the page load.”
In plain terms: you show a still picture of the map, with a play or view button over it, and the real interactive map loads only when somebody clicks. A visitor who never touches it never pays for it. If your map comes from a plugin or a page builder, check its settings for an option that holds the map back until somebody clicks. The same thinking applies to every heavy thing on the page, and images are usually the next one: we have written that up in best practices on SEO for images.
In Singapore, the pin is on the building. Your customer needs the unit.
This is the part that decides whether somebody finds you.
Singapore’s own national map searches in three units. OneMap, run by the Singapore Land Authority and described on its site as “the authoritative and most comprehensive map of Singapore”, advertises its search as finding “any address, postal code, or building name”. A unit number is not on that list. Reading that as the reason a map lands a customer at the building rather than at the door is our own reading, and not something SLA says. So a customer heading to a unit in an industrial block or an office tower gets a pin on the building, and then has to work out the rest: which lobby, which lift bank, which floor.
Your registered address can make it worse. ACRA is explicit that your registered office “does not have to be the same place where you run your business activities”, and gives its own example: “your registered office can be in Raffles Place while your factory operates in Tuas”. It has to be a Singapore address that is “open and accessible to the public during normal business hours”. For a great many small companies that description fits their corporate secretary’s office and nothing else. Put that address on your Business Profile and your map will politely direct every customer to your accountant.
So the map on your own site is the one place you can fix what a pin alone cannot. Beside the map, in plain text a person can read on a phone in the lift lobby, put four things:
- The full address including the unit number, written out as text beside the map.
- Which building entrance or lobby to use, if there is more than one.
- The nearest MRT station and the exit letter, and how long the walk is.
- Where to park, and whether visitors can use it.
That is all yours to write, in your own words, on your own page. Write it once and it stays right until you move, and it is the part customers actually thank you for. If your unit is inside another business, such as a shop within a mall, also use the profile setting that names the host building, because Google says you “can request to have this info shown in your profile”.
The five minute check before you call it done
Two checks, on a phone, on the page that now holds the map.
First, read the page as a stranger would. Use your own phone for this. Can you see the unit number without pinching the map? Is the address selectable as text so it can be pasted into a maps app? Tap the pin and see which door it drops you at.
Second, measure what the map costs you. Run that page’s address through Google PageSpeed Insights, and read the mobile score. Then do it again with the map set to load only on click, and compare the two. If the gap is large, you now know the price of having the map load for every visitor whether they look at it or not, and you can decide it on your own numbers.
If both checks come back fine, the job is done, and it stays done. This is one of the few website tasks that does not need revisiting until your address changes.