[This is one of a series of articles originally published on Local Guides Connect]

I did not intend to publish this tip, as it was something which also happened to me, and I felt really silly when I figured out what the solution was. But a few days ago there was a question on the forum from someone facing exactly the same problem. So I will confess to it after all.

When you add a new point of interest, one of the mandatory fields is ‘category’. You can’t submit the information unless you add something in that field. And obviously you want to add the best fitting category. But the problem seems to be that the list you get presented to choose from is quite short and only contains some general categories (Restaurant, School, Bank, etc). Some very basic things like ‘Hair salon’ or ‘Accountant’ are simply not listed!

This was an easy one – and in the “default” list: bank

If you’re at this point, you have made the invalid assumption that the categories in that list are the only ones you can choose from. You should really only look at them as a kind of frequently used categories that are shown as examples. In reality you can access almost 4.000 different categories (or 3.000 in most other languages). The only thing you need to do is start typing the name of what you are looking for. In the hair salon example, typing ‘hair’ will certainly show you the category you are looking for. Yes, it is that easy.

The original article can be found here

Disclaimer: the practices described here as best practice are my personal interpretation, and I don’t claim any level of official endorsement.