For a lot of local businesses, the Google Business Profile is seen more often than the website is. It is the panel that appears beside search results, the pin on Google Maps, and the set of three local businesses shown above the ordinary results for anything with a place attached to it.
It is also free, owned by you, and frequently left in whatever state it was in when it was first claimed — which is a shame, because it answers more questions than most websites get asked.
The fields that do the most work
The primary category. This is the single most consequential setting on the profile, and it is worth spending real thought on. Google uses it to decide which searches you are a candidate for at all. "Electrician" and "Electrical installation service" are different categories with different results. Pick the one that matches what you most want to be found for, then add secondary categories for everything else you do.
The business name. This should be your actual trading name and nothing more. Adding descriptive words — the town, the service, a superlative — is against Google's own guidelines, and profiles do get edited or suspended for it. It is also easy for a competitor to report. The upside is small and the downside is losing the listing.
Address, or service area. If customers come to you, use the address. If you go to them, set a service area and hide the address instead, which is the correct arrangement for a trade working from home and avoids sending anyone to your front door. Do not list a virtual office or an accountant's address as a premises — that is one of the things Google actively checks.
Hours, including the unusual ones. Ordinary opening hours matter less than the exceptions. Bank holidays, the Christmas shutdown, the week you are away. A profile that says you are open when you are not produces a specific kind of irritated review.
Services and products. An underused section. It lets you list what you actually do in your own words, which gives Google far more to work with than a category alone.
If you do one thing after reading this, check your primary category. It is a thirty-second change and it determines which searches you are eligible to appear in at all.
The two things most people do not know they can edit
Questions and answers. There is a Q&A section on your profile, and anybody can both ask and answer. That includes people who do not work for you and may be guessing. It also includes you: you are allowed to post your own questions and answer them, which is the sensible way to handle the five things you get asked constantly. Left alone, this section fills with wrong answers from strangers.
Suggested edits. Members of the public can suggest changes to your hours, address and other details, and some of those go live without your approval. It is not common, but it happens, and the only way you find out is by looking. This is the main reason to check the profile monthly rather than annually.
Photographs
Profiles with photographs get engaged with more than profiles without, and the useful ones are not the polished ones. Completed work, the van, the premises from the road so people recognise it, the team. Add a few every couple of months rather than twenty in one go and never again.
One practical note: photographs taken on a phone carry location data, and photographs of a home address will carry the home address. If you work from home and have deliberately hidden it, that is worth being aware of.
Reviews, and replying to them
Reviews carry weight both with Google and with the person reading. Two habits are worth forming.
Ask, routinely. Most satisfied customers are perfectly willing and simply never think of it. A short message with a direct link, sent when the job is finished and they are pleased, is the whole technique. What you cannot do is offer anything in exchange — incentivised reviews are against Google's policies and against the CMA's rules on fake and misleading reviews.
Reply to all of them, including the good ones, and especially the poor ones. A measured reply to a critical review is read by every future customer who scrolls past it, and it does more good than the review does harm. Answer the substance, avoid arguing the detail in public, and offer a way to take it offline.
A steady trickle of reviews is worth more than an occasional burst, and replying is the part you fully control. Fifteen minutes a month covers both.
Where it connects to everything else
The profile is not a standalone thing. The name, address and phone number on it need to match what is on your website and on every directory you appear in, because inconsistency between them is one of the ordinary reasons a local business is harder to place than it should be. I have written that up in keeping your business details consistent everywhere.
It also needs to point at a website that works. A well-kept profile sending people to a slow page, a dead link or a lapsed domain is a wasted first impression — and lapsed domains are more common than you would expect, which is the subject of what happens when a domain quietly expires.
A short monthly routine
- Open the profile and check nothing has been changed by a suggested edit.
- Reply to any new reviews.
- Check the Q&A section for anything answered wrongly by a stranger.
- Add a photograph or two if there are any worth adding.
- Update hours for anything coming up — holidays, closures, changes.
That is about fifteen minutes, and it is the highest-return quarter of an hour available to most local businesses. It costs nothing but the time, which is the unusual part.
If you would rather this sat alongside a proper look at the website each month, that is what SEO Management covers, and the profile is part of what gets checked.