The website has done its job. Someone found the business, read the offer, noted the appointment. Twenty minutes later that same person is standing in the rain outside a residential building, because the workshop sits in a rear courtyard, the satnav has never heard of the gateway, and the website listed nothing but a street and a house number. They arrive late, or they do not arrive at all. Both cost money, and both are avoidable. A good directions page does not answer where a business is located; it answers how you get to the door: which entrance, which bell, where to park, which bus, how many minutes on foot, how many steps. This article builds that page from scratch and resolves the conflict most directions pages get stuck on along the way: you want to show a map without sending visitor data to somebody else's server before anyone has clicked on anything.
The last hundred metres decide it
The research happens before the visit, and it happens online. In a Bitkom survey of 1,180 (Bitkom e.V.) German internet users aged 16 and over, 73 per cent (Bitkom e.V.) said they want to be able to check information about what is available locally online in advance, and 74 per cent (Bitkom e.V.) would like to reserve products online before setting out. The trip to the shop therefore starts at a screen — and that is where it is decided whether it happens at all.
How short the window is after that shows up in local search data: 76 per cent (Think with Google) of people who search on a smartphone for something nearby visit a related business within a day, and 28 per cent (Think with Google) of those searches result in a purchase. Weeks rarely pass between search and visit. Often it is a lunch break. Anyone who fails to answer, in that window, where exactly the entrance is and whether there is parking loses the enquiry to the nearest business whose page does answer it.
Scope: hours live elsewhere
It helps to think of the directions page not as a data sheet but as an answer to the questions someone actually asks while already on the way. Those questions are remarkably uniform across industries:
- Where do I stop? Is there a courtyard, a driveway, customer parking spaces — and if not, then where?
- Which door is it? Front building or rear courtyard, shop entrance or intercom panel, first bell or second.
- How do I recognise the building? Colour, neighbours, sign, canopy — anything visible from the street.
- Can I get there by public transport? Which line, which stop, how many minutes on foot.
- Can I get in? Steps, ramp, lift, door width, toilet — in numbers, not adjectives.
- Where do I deliver? For hauliers, trades and suppliers, the customer entrance is usually the wrong one.
A page that answers these six questions is rarely longer than one screen plus a little scrolling. It is still one of the few pages where the effort shows up directly in booked appointments — much like the contact form that actually collects enquiries.
An address is not an entrance
A postal address describes where letters go. It does not describe where people walk in. In older town centres, in commercial courtyards and on farmsteads the two regularly come apart: the house number belongs to the front building, the business sits at the back. The shop entrance is two doors along from the intercom. The way into the yard is an unremarkable gateway between two shops that you drive past three times before you spot it.
The text that resolves this needs no poetry, just nouns you can see from the street. Three sentences usually do it: where the entrance is, how you recognise it, what happens next. It helps to follow the order in which someone actually perceives things — first the building, then the gateway, then the door, then the bell.
| Wording on the page | What the visitor gets from it | The version that holds up |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Sample Street, 31185 Söhlde | Finds the house number, sees a residential building, rings a stranger's bell | Address plus: access through the gateway between numbers 1 and 3 |
| Conveniently located in the centre | Nothing. It appears on every second website | Second building in the courtyard, grey roller shutter, entrance to the right of it |
| Parking available | No idea how many, for whom, or whether they are taken | Four marked customer spaces in the courtyard; if full, the market car park, three minutes on foot |
| Accessible entrance | Could mean anything from step-free to one step | Level access, clear door width 90 cm, accessible WC on the ground floor, disabled bay in front of the gate |
| Good bus connections | No idea which line or how far | Lines 4 and 12, Markt stop, five minutes on foot, route signposted |
The photo that ends the search
The photo needs alternative text that carries the same information in words — not company building but grey brick house with a green canopy, entrance to the right of the gateway. That helps people who cannot see it, and it makes the link between picture and place readable for search engines too.
Describe parking honestly, alternatives included
Parking is where websites embellish most often, and it is where the embellishment backfires fastest. Write parking right outside the door while meaning two residents' bays and you have produced an irritated customer before the conversation has started. The version that holds up quotes numbers and names the fallback.
- Number and type:
four marked customer spaces in the courtyardinstead ofparking available. - When full: the nearest alternative by name, with distance and walking time in minutes.
- Cost and time limits: parking disc, maximum stay, charges — this saves fines and irritation.
- Residents' zones: if the street outside is permit-controlled, that belongs on the page, not on the windscreen.
- Disabled bay: location, number, distance to the entrance, surface.
- Large vehicles: motorhome, trailer, van — if your customers arrive in one, say where it fits.
Two sentences cover the alternatives: If the courtyard is full: market car park, entrance via Lange Gasse, three minutes on foot through the pedestrian zone. The square by the church requires a parking disc, two hours maximum. That is not advertising, it is service information — which is precisely why it works. Describing the situation soberly reads as more credible than promising convenient parking.
The sentence that saves phone calls
Between 11am and 2pm the courtyard is usually full. If you are coming then, the market car park is the calmer option. It is honest, it steers visitor flows, and it takes the edge off the disappointment on arrival.Public transport: line, stop, minutes
The public transport section is the shortest on the page and still the one most often left out — presumably because well connected feels complete. It is not. It becomes usable with three details: line, stop, walking time in minutes. Add the direction you walk in from the stop, because that is exactly where people stand with a phone in hand, turning in circles.
Lines, not modes
Lines 4 and 12 says more than reachable by bus. Anyone who knows the timetable can do the maths immediately.
Name the stop
The official stop name as printed on the timetable and used in journey planners — not the local nickname.
Walking time in minutes
Measured, not guessed. And walked once with a wheeled suitcase, so the number holds for everyone else too.
Direction of travel
Continue in the direction the bus was heading, right after 100 metres ends the orientation puzzle at the stop.
Cover the station separately
If customers come from out of town, the route from the railway station deserves its own lines — with the change or the taxi rank.
Gradients and surfaces
Cobblestones, steps or a steep lane on the walking route matter to a good many people's decisions.
Do not embed a journey planner widget here. A plain text link to the local transport authority is enough and loads nothing while the page builds. That this restraint serves speed as well as data protection is measurable: every foreign connection costs time during page load — a relationship the article on maps, videos and fonts without data leaks takes apart in detail.
On-site accessibility in plain words
At the end of 2023 around 7.9 million (Federal Statistical Office of Germany) people with a recognised severe disability lived in Germany, equal to 9.3 per cent (Federal Statistical Office of Germany) of the population. Just under 91 per cent (Federal Statistical Office of Germany) of those disabilities were caused by illness, so they largely arise during the course of a life. Add people with temporary impairments, older customers and parents with pushchairs, and the group for whom two steps are relevant information is considerably larger than the statistic suggests.
The Bundesfachstelle Barrierefreiheit, Germany's federal agency for accessibility, describes the goal as an unbroken chain of routes: accessibility only exists when the path from the property boundary, across the paths on the site and through the entrance area to every part of the building is usable without a break (Bundesfachstelle Barrierefreiheit). As the recognised technical rule for publicly accessible buildings it points to DIN 18040-1 (Bundesfachstelle Barrierefreiheit). For a directions page that means describing the chain exactly where it can break.
Steps and thresholds
State the number and the height. One step of 12 cm at the entrance is information you can plan around; largely accessible is not.
Ramp
Present or absent, fixed or portable, and at what gradient. DIN 18040-1 allows ramps of up to 6 per cent (DIN 18040-1), with an intermediate landing of 150 cm (DIN 18040-1) after at most 600 cm (DIN 18040-1).
Door width
The clear opening width in centimetres. The reference figure is at least 90 cm (DIN 18040-1), with a manoeuvring area of 150 by 150 cm (DIN 18040-1) before and after a ramp.
Lift
Present or not, in which part of the building, with which car dimensions. And whether it is reachable during your hours without someone unlocking a door.
Accessible WC
Yes or no, on which floor, freely accessible or key-operated. A no is an answer — an omission is not.
Disabled parking bay
Location and distance to the entrance. DIN 18040-1 gives at least 350 cm (DIN 18040-1) width and 500 cm (DIN 18040-1) length for car spaces.
Describe it, do not dress it up
Accessible is a term with legal substance, not a marketing flourish. Using it while a step sits in the way risks more than an awkward moment at the door; it risks a claim that will not hold. The version that does hold is descriptive: Access via one step of 12 cm; a portable ramp is available and will be put in place on request, a call in advance helps. That is honest, it is usable, and it turns an obstacle into an arrangement.The directions page is the place for the accessibility of the building. The accessibility of the website itself is a separate subject with its own requirements and deadlines — covered in the article on accessible business websites under the European Accessibility Act. Only together do the two produce what customers expect: a page you can operate, about a building you can enter.
The delivery entrance and the B2B case
As soon as goods arrive, the business has two audiences on two different routes. Customers should reach the shop door, the haulier should reach the loading bay — and if both get the same address, the articulated lorry ends up in the pedestrian zone. A dedicated paragraph headed Deliveries solves it, and it belongs visibly on the same page, not in a PDF in a download area.
- Access route: from which street, through which gate, with what clearance height and width.
- Bay or ground level: height of the loading dock, whether a pallet truck can be used, whether a forklift is on hand.
- Time windows: when deliveries are possible and whether an appointment is required.
- Contact: a phone number for the yard, not the switchboard — drivers call from the cab.
- Turning space: whether a lorry can turn or has to reverse in. This detail decides route planning.
- What does not work: dead end, weight limit, bollard with a key — restrictions are worth more than reassurances.
For businesses with regular goods traffic, a dedicated Deliveries subpage is worth it: short, linkable, and it saves the office the same email over and over. Which pages a company site needs beyond that is mapped out in the article on which pages a business website needs.
Written directions from two approaches
Written directions read as old-fashioned, and they are worth their weight exactly when the technology drops out: when the satnav does not know the gateway, when roadworks close the access road, when mobile coverage collapses in the industrial estate, when someone prints the page the evening before. Two approach directions are enough — the two your customers actually come from. Each needs three to five steps, and each step needs a visible landmark.
From the north (motorway exit Mitte)
1. Along Bahnhofstrasse towards the centre until the second set of lights.
2. Turn right into Lange Gasse. The sign "Anlieferung Markthalle"
is on the left-hand side.
3. After 200 metres, the gateway between the pharmacy and the florist,
grey roller shutter, open during the day.
4. Straight ahead in the courtyard to the second building. Entrance to
the right of the shutter, second bell from the top.
From the south (harbour approach)
1. At the roundabout, take the second exit towards the centre.
2. Immediately after the bridge, left into Uferstrasse (one-way street,
customer access permitted).
3. Left at the end, then the third entrance on the right, directly
behind the bank's car park.
4. Keep left in the courtyard, entrance under the green canopy,
second bell from the top.
On foot from the Markt stop (lines 4 and 12)
Continue in the direction the bus was heading, right into Lange Gasse
after 100 metres, then the second gateway on the left. Five minutes on
foot, last 30 metres cobblestones.Note the closing clause. Last 30 metres cobblestones is the kind of detail nobody misses while it is absent and that decides the matter for part of your customer base. The same goes for open during the day on the roller shutter and customer access permitted in the one-way street: they answer doubts that arise at precisely that point on the route.
The field test costs twenty minutes
The map: show it static, connect on click
The usual solution is an embedded map frame, copied out of a map provider's share dialog. It looks good and has an uncomfortable side effect: the visitor's browser opens the connection to the external server as soon as the page loads — before any consent, on every single visit. What travels with it is at minimum the IP address, the browser identifier and the address of the page being viewed.
That the site operator shares responsibility for this was settled by the Court of Justice of the European Union in the Fashion ID case. It concerned a social media button on a retailer's website; the transfer happened as soon as the page was opened, without the visitor being aware of it (CJEU, C-40/17). The court classified the website operator as a joint controller — limited to the collection and transmission of the data, not to what the provider does with it afterwards (CJEU, C-40/17).
It is therefore for the operator of the website, and not for the provider of the social plugin, to obtain that consent, since it is the fact that a visitor consults that website that triggers the process of the processing of personal data.
The reasoning transfers to a map frame without any strain: there too the page view alone triggers the transfer, there too the person is unaware, and there too it is the operator who decides whether that connection exists at all. The practical consequence is refreshingly simple, because a directions page does not need the map as an interactive frame in the first place.
| Variant | What happens on page load | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| Embedded map frame | Connection to the map service before any consent; IP address and browser identifier go with it | low, in exchange for a permanently open legal question |
| Static map extract as an image | Nothing. The image sits on your own domain | produce once and check the licence terms |
| Your own site sketch as a vector graphic | Nothing. It can also be labelled with courtyard, entrance and bays | draw once, and it is more precise than any map |
| Map after click-to-load | Only after a deliberate decision by the visitor | needs a release area and explanatory text |
A Start route button | Nothing. The map service opens in a new tab only after the click | one link, done |
Combining your own site sketch with a Start route button covers both needs: anyone who wants to get oriented sees the sketch with courtyard, entrance and parking straight away. Anyone who wants to navigate taps the button and lands in their usual route planner — with the difference that they triggered that step themselves. The one thing that matters is that the button stays an ordinary link and loads no script from the map service in the background.
<figure class="directions-map">
<img src="/img/site-sketch.svg" width="800" height="500" loading="lazy"
alt="Site sketch: gateway between the pharmacy and the florist,
courtyard with four parking bays, entrance right of the shutter." />
<figcaption>Access through the gateway between house numbers 1 and 3</figcaption>
</figure>
<a class="button" href="https://mapservice.example/route?to=52.15833,10.17194"
target="_blank" rel="noopener">
Start route (opens the map service in a new tab)
</a>
<p class="note">
Clicking this link takes you off our website.
The map service will process your IP address.
</p>The notice belongs by the link, not in a banner
One spelling for name, address and phone number
Once the directions page exists, the address appears in several places at once: on the directions page itself, in the footer, on the contact page, in the imprint, in the business profile, on invoices. Every one of those is an opportunity for a discrepancy — Street against St., the legal form sometimes present and sometimes not, the phone number once in international format and once with a leading zero. To people that is irrelevant. To systems that reconcile details from different sources it is noise.
The pragmatic approach is a binding spelling, defined once and then adopted everywhere: company name exactly as registered, street written out, phone number in international format. Feeding the address from a single master record into every page and legal text solves the problem structurally instead of patching it manually four times a year.
The same spelling belongs in the machine-readable markup. Google Search Central lists exactly two required properties for the LocalBusiness type: name and address (Google Search Central). Recommended properties include telephone, url, openingHoursSpecification and geo, with coordinates specified to at least five decimal places (Google Search Central). Two notes from the documentation matter for businesses with more than one address: each location should be marked up as its own LocalBusiness, and the most specific applicable sub-type should be used — Restaurant or HealthClub rather than the generic LocalBusiness (Google Search Central).
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "HardwareStore",
"name": "Company name exactly as in the imprint",
"url": "https://www.example.com/directions/",
"telephone": "+49 5123 9579000",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "Musterstraße 1",
"postalCode": "31185",
"addressLocality": "Söhlde",
"addressCountry": "DE"
},
"geo": {
"@type": "GeoCoordinates",
"latitude": 52.15833,
"longitude": 10.17194
},
"hasMap": "https://www.example.com/directions/",
"publicAccess": true
}How structured data is built and where it becomes visible in search results is covered in the article on structured data for better search results. Reconciling it with the Google Business Profile belongs in the same work session: whatever appears there as name, address and phone number should match the website character for character.
- Write down the binding spelling: company name, street, postcode, town, phone number, email address.
- Check website, imprint, contact page, footer and business profile for discrepancies — character by character.
- Mark the location up as
LocalBusinesswith the appropriate sub-type, withnameandaddressas the minimum (Google Search Central). - Add
geowith at least five decimal places (Google Search Central) so the pin lands in the courtyard and not out on the street. - Link the markup to the directions page via
urlandhasMapso it is clear which page describes the place. - Put a yearly reminder in the calendar for the reconciliation — dialling codes, street names and house numbers change rarely, but they do change.
Several locations, or no premises at all
Two cases break the simple pattern, and both are more common than the textbook case of one address and one entrance.
Several locations
Each location gets its own page with its own directions, its own hours and its own markup. An overview page links them and names the core purpose of each — workshop, showroom, warehouse.
No premises
Instead of a visitor address, the service area takes centre stage: towns, districts, radius in kilometres. The registered address stays in the imprint without reading as an invitation to visit.
Office at home
Working from your own flat means the address belongs in the imprint while the contact page offers appointments by arrangement. A line saying visits by arrangement prevents unannounced doorbell rings.
For a business without premises, where do you work? replaces where are you?. A sober list of the places you regularly work in is useful, together with the radius in kilometres and an honest note on travel charges. That spares both sides enquiries that would not have worked out anyway. How to build local visibility from there is described in the article on local visibility for small businesses.
With several locations the biggest source of error is the copy: a location page is created as a duplicate of the first one and half the details stay behind. A better structure feeds address, hours and contact details per location from one data record while the prose stays individual — the directions description is precisely the part that cannot be copied.
Building the directions page in one pass
A complete directions page takes about half a day if you keep to the order and gather the information first. The biggest time sink is looking things up while writing; measuring and photographing first, then writing, finishes considerably faster.
- Walk it yourself: from the stop, from the car park, from the street. Time the walk with a watch, do not estimate it.
- Photograph: facade from the direction of arrival, gateway, entrance, bell panel, delivery point. Five pictures suffice.
- Measure: step height, clear door width, ramp gradient, distance from the disabled bay to the entrance.
- Draw the site sketch with courtyard, entrance, bays, delivery point and transport stop — as a vector graphic so it stays sharp.
- Write directions from two approaches, three to five steps each, with visible landmarks.
- Replace the map: sketch or static extract plus a
Start routebutton instead of an embedded frame. - Unify the spelling and feed the address from one source into every page and legal text.
- Add structured data: LocalBusiness with
name,address,geoandtelephone(Google Search Central). - Have it read by someone who has never been there — without a satnav, with the page printed out.
Whether that effort is worth it inside the existing website, or whether a bigger step is due anyway, is a separate judgement. The article on when a new website really pays off sorts the warning signs, and anyone already facing the question of how to get there will find the differences in cost, control and upkeep in the comparison of website builders, agencies and AI-assisted creation. How the finished page holds up on small screens is examined in the article on mobile usability — and a directions page is read on a phone.
What counts in the end
I could not find you. Everything else is decoration. The number is at the top of this article — 76 per cent (Think with Google) visit a business within a day of searching for something nearby on a phone. Those people have already decided. All they still need is the door.Sources and studies
accessible has defined substance and is measured against DIN 18040-1 (Bundesfachstelle Barrierefreiheit).appointments at your site, office address in the imprint prevents unannounced visits and answers the question of reach at the same time.