Your Google Business Profile Is Doing More Work Than Your Website
A gym I built a site for gets more visitors from its Google listing than from anything else. That listing has a button on it pointing at a booking platform the owner stopped using months ago. It still out-performs everything else.
That is roughly the state of local search for most small businesses. The website matters. The Google Business Profile matters more, it is free, and it is usually the thing nobody has looked at properly since the day it was set up.
This post is what to actually do with it. If you want the wider picture first, my post on local SEO basics covers where the profile sits alongside everything else.
Where Your Customers Actually Are
Search for a local service on a phone and look at what fills the screen before you have to scroll. A map. Three businesses with star ratings, opening hours and a call button. Possibly an ad. Somewhere below all of that, the ordinary blue links where your website lives.
Those three map results are the local pack, and they are drawn almost entirely from Google Business Profiles rather than from websites. For a plumber, a gym, a salon or a dentist, that block takes a large share of the clicks, because it answers the question the searcher actually had: who is near me, are they open, are they any good, what is the number.
Your website still matters. It is what someone reads while deciding between you and the other two listings. But the profile is what gets you into that comparison, and it costs nothing.
The Settings Most Profiles Never Get
Most profiles I look at were filled in once, in about ten minutes, some years ago. Name, address, phone, one category, one photo. Everything after that was left at the default.
Worth going through properly:
- Primary category. The single most important field. More on this below.
- Additional categories. You get several more. Add the ones you genuinely do, not everything you can think of.
- Services. A structured list, separate from your description. An itemised menu of what you offer belongs here.
- Business description. 750 characters in your own words. Plain and specific beats a paragraph of marketing language.
- Opening hours, and special hours. Bank holidays and Christmas closures are a separate setting. Getting them wrong is one of the few things that reliably annoys people enough to write a review about it.
- Attributes. Wheelchair access, parking, payment types, and similar. Some of these are filterable in search.
- Booking or appointment link. If you take bookings, this becomes a button on your listing.
- Service area. For businesses that travel to the customer rather than the other way round.
- Questions and answers. You are allowed to post your own questions and answer them. Most businesses do not, so the section fills up with guesses from the public instead.
Your Primary Category Decides Which Searches You Can Win
Of everything on the profile, the primary category does the most work. It behaves more like a filter than a label: it largely determines which searches you are eligible to appear in at all.
A personal trainer listed under Gym and a personal trainer listed under Personal Trainer will surface for different queries, and no amount of good reviews will move you into a category you are not in. If someone searches for a personal trainer near them and your primary category is Gym, you are entered in the wrong race.
Photos, and What They Are Actually For
Photos are not decoration. They are the closest thing a stranger has to walking past your premises.
Worth uploading: the outside of the building from the direction people approach it, so they recognise it when they arrive. The inside. Your team. The work itself, before and after where that makes sense. The van, if you have one, because a signwritten van parked in a customer's driveway is a trust signal.
Not worth uploading: stock photography. It is recognisable, and on a local listing it reads as though there was nothing real to show. A slightly imperfect photograph of your actual reception desk does more for you than a perfect photograph of somebody else's.
Add a few every couple of months rather than thirty in one afternoon and then nothing for two years.
Reviews, and How to Get Them Without Being Awkward
Reviews affect where you rank and they affect whether anyone clicks. Both matter, and most small businesses have fewer than they have earned.
The practical mechanics:
- Get your review link. Google gives you a short URL that opens the review box directly. Without it you are asking someone to go and find your listing themselves, and a good proportion will not.
- Ask at the moment the job is finished and the customer is pleased. Not a week later by email, when the feeling has faded.
- Put the link where it is already in front of them: the bottom of an invoice, a follow-up text, a small card.
- Reply to all of them, including the bad ones. A calm, specific reply to a complaint is read by everyone who comes afterwards, and it usually does more good than the complaint did harm.
What not to do is offer anything in exchange. It is against Google's guidelines, customers can spot it, and a run of glowing reviews in a short window is exactly the pattern that gets filtered out.
Posts, and Whether They Are Worth the Effort
Google lets you publish short updates to your profile, a bit like social posts. Opinions vary on how much they affect ranking and I am not going to claim they do much.
They do take up space on your listing, they can carry an offer or an event, and they take about two minutes. My honest position is that they are worth doing when you have something real to say and not worth manufacturing content for.
If you are choosing between writing a profile post and getting three more reviews, get the reviews.
The Mistakes That Quietly Cost You Calls
These are the ones I keep finding on real listings.
- A button pointing somewhere wrong. The gym I mentioned at the top has a booking button aimed at a platform it no longer uses. Everyone who taps it lands somewhere that cannot help them, and nothing in the profile tells the owner that is happening.
- Duplicate listings. Often created by accident, sometimes years apart. Two listings split your reviews and your ranking signals between them, and the weaker one is frequently the one people find. Google has a process for merging them and it is worth the paperwork.
- A phone number or address that does not match the website. Different formatting is fine. Different information is not.
- Keywords stuffed into the business name. Adding your town and your services to the name field is against the guidelines, competitors can and do report it, and the outcome is suspension rather than a gentle warning.
- An unclaimed listing. Google generates listings for businesses that never asked for one. If yours is unclaimed, members of the public can suggest edits to it and you will not be told.
- Hours that are wrong. Turning up to a closed shop that said it was open is the fastest way to lose someone permanently.
Joining It Back Up to Your Website
The profile and the site should agree with each other and hand people between them cleanly.
Point the website link at a page that answers the search, not automatically the homepage. If someone searched for a specific service, sending them to the page about that service converts better than sending them to a general introduction.
Keep the name, address and phone number identical across the profile, your site footer and any directory you appear in. Search engines use that agreement as a confidence check.
An Hour Well Spent
If you do nothing else, do these, in this order:
- Claim the listing if it is not already claimed.
- Check the primary category against what people actually search for.
- Fix any link or button pointing somewhere out of date.
- Search your own business name and check there is only one listing.
- Fill in services, description, hours and special hours.
- Add six real photographs.
- Get your review link and start asking.
That is most of an hour, it costs nothing, and for a lot of local businesses it shifts more than a month of work on the website would.
