Your Google Business Profile matters more than your website

Most businesses spend months on a website and twenty minutes on their Google Business Profile. For a company whose customers are nearby and searching on a phone, that is almost exactly backwards.

When someone searches for a service near them, the map pack appears above the ordinary results. Three businesses, with star ratings, opening hours and a call button. Many people never scroll past it. Your website could be excellent and still lose to a competitor whose profile is simply more complete.

Worth knowing: this matters beyond Google now. When we tested how AI assistants answer local business questions here, the answers were assembled largely from Business Profiles and directories rather than from company websites — star ratings, categories and review counts, pulled straight from the map. The profile has quietly become a bigger asset than it was two years ago.

Fix these first

1. Your primary category

The single highest-impact field, and the one most often wrong. Google uses it to decide which searches you are even a candidate for. Pick the wrong one and no amount of other work puts you in the pack.

Don't guess. Search the term you want to appear for, look at the three businesses in the map pack, and check what category each of them uses. If all three say one thing and you say another, that is your answer. Add secondary categories for your other services, but choose the primary one deliberately.

2. Reviews

Rating and review volume are what the pack ranks on, and they are what a human decides on. A business with forty reviews at 4.6 beats one with three reviews at 5.0, every time.

Most businesses have delivered good work for years and simply never asked. Ask. Not by bulk email — personally, to the clients who would say something good, with the direct review link. Ten genuine reviews will do more for your local visibility than months of anything else.

Then respond to all of them, including the negative ones, within a couple of days. The reply is read by the next customer, not the one who wrote it.

What not to do: buy reviews, incentivise them, or write them yourself. It is detectable, and profile suspension costs far more than the reviews were worth.

3. Complete every field

Phone number. Full opening hours including public holidays. Services listed individually rather than as one lump. Products where relevant. Attributes. The business description written properly, with specifics rather than adjectives.

Google's own prompts tell you what is missing. Most profiles have three or four empty sections that take an afternoon to fill.

4. Photographs

Ten at minimum, refreshed every few months. Your premises from outside so people can find it, inside so they know what to expect, your team, and your actual work. Profiles with photos get materially more interaction than those without — and a profile with two photos from 2023 reads as a business that may have closed.

5. Name, address and phone, identical everywhere

Your profile, your website, your invoices, your social accounts, every directory you're listed in. The same name, spelled the same way. The same address format. The same phone number.

Inconsistency confuses both Google and the AI systems now reading these listings. If your profile says one thing and your website another, you are two half-recognised businesses rather than one clearly recognised one. This is the least glamorous item here and one of the most valuable.

Then keep it alive

A profile is not a form you fill in once.

Post something every week or two. An offer, a completed job, a seasonal note. It signals an active business.

Answer the Q&A section. You can post questions and answer them yourself — real ones customers actually ask. Most businesses leave this empty, and it's free content in a place people read.

Check your own listing monthly. Google sometimes accepts edits from the public. Hours change without you knowing, categories get suggested, and occasionally a competitor marks a business as closed.

What this is worth

An afternoon on the categories, services and photos. A week of asking for reviews. Twenty minutes a fortnight after that.

Against a website rebuild, that is nothing — and for a business whose customers are within a few kilometres, it will usually produce more calls sooner. It is not a replacement for the website. It's the thing most likely to be underperforming right now, and the cheapest to fix.

If you'd rather not do it yourself

Business Profile work sits inside our search visibility service, alongside the technical and content side. We set the categories against what actually ranks in your market, complete the profile properly, build you a review workflow you can run without us, and keep your business information consistent everywhere it appears.

Details are on our SEO and AI search visibility page. Or send us your profile link and we'll tell you the three things we'd fix first — no charge, and no obligation to have us do it.