Google Business Profile: the free listing most businesses waste

If people find you by typing a service and a place, plumber Maidstone, dentist near me, garage that does MOTs, then your Google Business Profile is working harder than your website, and it is almost certainly half filled in. Nearly every profile I open has the same three holes: the wrong primary category, an empty services section, and photographs from whenever somebody last thought about it. The listing is free. Two hours fixes most of it.

Optimising it is not clever work. Fill every field honestly, pick the primary category your best competitors use, keep a slow trickle of photos and reviews going, and avoid the handful of tricks that get profiles suspended. That is the whole job. Below is each field and what it actually does, then the thirty minutes a month that keeps the thing alive.

What the profile drives, and what it doesn't

Three surfaces run off it. The map pack is the block of three businesses with a map above the ordinary blue links, and on a phone it fills the first screen. The local finder is the longer list behind "More places". The brand panel is the box that appears when somebody searches your name, usually because they already have your card and want your number.

Google picks those positions on relevance, distance and prominence. Distance you cannot change without moving. Prominence is mostly reviews. Relevance is the profile itself, which is why it is the cheapest thing on your list.

This is a separate contest from ranking your website. Blue links are won with pages and links; the map pack is won with the profile. The same search shows both, you can win one and lose the other, and the levers barely overlap, so if your site is nowhere in the blue links, that is a different problem with different causes.

The business name

Use the name on your van, your invoices and your door. Nothing else.

Adding a keyword, "Maidstone Boiler Repair | Ridgeway Heating", works in the short term, which is why it keeps happening. It also breaks Google's representation guidelines, and any competitor can report it in ninety seconds through "Suggest an edit" or the Business Redressal Complaint Form.

The mild outcome is a silent revert to your real name. The bad one is a hard suspension: the profile disappears from Maps and your reviews go with it. That is a poor trade for two extra positions.

Primary category

You get one primary category and up to nine additional ones. The primary is the strongest single signal for which searches you appear in, and it is the field I find wrong most often, usually because whoever set the profile up picked the first plausible option and never looked again.

Check yours in ten minutes. Search your main money term in a private window, open the local finder, and read the category printed under the top three businesses. Faster still, the free GMB Everywhere extension for Chrome prints every competitor's categories straight onto the results page.

Change it once, deliberately. Rankings usually move about for a week or two before settling, so swapping categories every fortnight teaches you nothing except patience.

Additional categories

Each extra category opens another set of searches, which makes it tempting to add all nine. Don't. Categories you do not really serve dilute what Google thinks you are, and they fill your phone with jobs you have to turn down.

The test: would you quote for it tomorrow, and do you want the work? A café that genuinely makes birthday cakes should add "Cake shop". A gas engineer who adds "Air conditioning contractor" without touching air conditioning has bought himself unpaid phone calls. Four or five true ones is normally the lot.

Services, and their descriptions

The services section is free shelf space and most profiles leave it empty. Each service takes a name, from Google's suggested list, or typed in yourself, plus a description of up to 300 characters. Google matches what people type against that text, and the custom ones catch the phrasing the category list ignores.

Write them the way you would explain the job on the phone, with a number in them:

Consumer unit upgrade. Replacing an old fuse box with a modern RCBO board, including full testing and an electrical installation certificate. Usually one day, from £550 on a three-bed. Certificate emailed the same evening.

That does two jobs at once. Google gets usable text, and the person whose budget was £200 works out on their own that it is not you. Twenty services with descriptions is about forty minutes, once.

The business description

750 characters, shown under "From the business", and I have never seen it move a ranking. It is a conversion field: the paragraph a stranger reads while deciding whether to ring you.

Only the first 250 characters or so show before the "more" link, so lead with what you do, where, and your strongest bit of proof: the Gas Safe number, the years trading, the guarantee. No phone numbers or URLs, both against the guidelines, and no keyword lists. They read as badly to a customer as they sound.

Attributes

A page of tick boxes: card payments, on-site parking, wheelchair-accessible entrance, appointment required, online estimates, women-owned. Which ones you are offered depends on your category, and they matter more than they look, because several are filters in Maps. Somebody browsing with the accessibility filter on will not see you if you have not ticked it, however good the rest of your profile is. Two minutes, once a year.

Service area

If customers cannot turn up at your premises and be served there, take the address off and set a service area instead. A home address dressed up as a shopfront is one of the fastest routes to suspension there is, and reinstatement takes weeks you cannot spare.

Now the part nobody selling local SEO wants to say. Your service area does not make you rank across it. You rank in a radius around your pin, and listing twenty towns does not put you in twenty map packs.

In practice: strong in your own town, competitive out to five or eight miles, thin past ten to fifteen unless the area is rural. If the work you want is twenty-five miles away, that needs a second base or paid ads, not a longer list of place names.

Hours, and special hours

People filter by "open now" far more than you would guess, and wrong hours cost you calls silently. Set the standard week properly, including the afternoon you close early.

Then do the bit everyone skips. Special hours for Christmas and Boxing Day, New Year, both May bank holidays, Good Friday and Easter Monday, the late August weekend. Google prompts you before most of them and the prompt is easy to dismiss. Somebody who drives to a closed shop that Google said was open leaves a one-star review, and they are not wrong to.

The booking link

If you take appointments, add one. It puts a Book button on the profile and it converts better than anything else there, because the customer never has to load your site or fill in a form. Some booking systems feed Google automatically; otherwise you paste the URL in under Bookings.

Only do it if the link lands on something showing real availability. A Book button that opens a contact form is worse than no button, because you promised a slot and delivered a queue. A garage booking page should work exactly like that: pick the MOT slot, get the confirmation, no phone call.

Photos

Upload real work. The van outside a job, the finished bathroom, the consumer unit before and after, the shopfront with the door number visible so people know they have found the right building. If customers come inside, photograph the inside.

Cadence beats volume. Three or four a month, every month, does more than forty uploaded in one afternoon and then two years of silence. Shoot at 720 × 720 pixels or larger, keep them sharp, and refresh the cover photo when it stops being true.

On geotagging: it does nothing I have ever been able to measure. Google strips most EXIF data on upload, and the services selling geotagged image packs are selling a ritual. Take a better photograph of the finished job instead.

Posts

Posts sit on your profile for seven days, or until the end date if you set one. They are a conversion nudge, not a ranking tactic. I have never seen posting move a map position, and I have watched people spend an evening a week on it.

What works: an offer with a price and a deadline, a service you genuinely did not offer before, a seasonal reminder timed right. What doesn't: "we are open as usual", stock photos of handshakes, anything written because it is Tuesday. One post every two or three weeks is plenty, and missing a month costs you nothing measurable. If posting is competing with replying to reviews, reply to the reviews.

Reviews: ranking and conversion at once

Reviews are the only thing on this list that pays twice. They feed prominence, a third of how Google picks the map pack, and they are what a stranger reads before choosing between you and the firm listed underneath you.

Count matters less than people assume. Recency and rate carry real weight, which is good news if you are sitting on four and the firm above you has ninety, all from 2021. Forty reviews with four from this month beats a hundred and twenty that stopped two years ago.

Ask at the moment of relief, on the drive, while the customer is still pleased the leak has stopped, then text the link before you pull away. Take the short link from the "Ask for reviews" button and save it as a template so it takes six seconds. Asked face to face and followed by a text before you drive off, a good share of customers leave one. Emailed a week later, once the job has faded, almost nobody does.

One automatic text sent two days after each invoice is settled will out-perform any amount of manual chasing, because it arrives while the job is still fresh and it never gets forgotten on a busy week. No incentive needed, and none allowed under Google's rules anyway.

Never filter and never pay. Asking only the customers you think are pleased breaks Google's rules, and a discount for five stars breaks them harder. Both read as fake to the people you are trying to convince.

Replying to a bad one

Reply to every review within a couple of days. The bad ones deserve the most care, because prospects read your reply far more carefully than they read the complaint. Here is the shape:

Hello Mark. You are right and I am sorry. We took an emergency in Bearsted that morning, and I should have rung to say we were running late rather than leaving you waiting in all day. Your call-out charge has been refunded. If you would like us to come back and check that joint there is no charge for it, ask for Dan on the office line.

Facts, ownership, a specific remedy, a name, stop. No second paragraph, no arguing the timeline, no "we pride ourselves on". If the review is unfair, or from somebody who was never a customer, say so once, calmly, and report it, but reply first, because the reply is what the next hundred readers see.

What actually gets profiles suspended

Two kinds. A soft suspension leaves the profile live but strips your edits and asks you to verify again. A hard suspension pulls it from Maps entirely, reviews included, and you appeal with documents.

• Keywords in the business name.
• An address you are not genuinely staffed at: a virtual office, a mailbox, your accountant's building, a registered office.
• Two profiles for the same business at one address.
• Changing several core fields at once. Name, address and category in the same week looks like a hijack.
• A category that contradicts what your own website says you do.
• Review manipulation, including twenty reviews in a week after two silent years.
• A competitor filing a redressal complaint about any of the above.

Reinstatement runs from a few days to several weeks, and you are invisible for all of it. Keep your evidence findable: a utility bill, business insurance, a rates bill, photos of signage and van livery. Change one core field at a time, and never let anybody put your town in your name.

Thirty minutes a month

1. Photos, 5 minutes. Three or four from jobs you did this month, straight off your phone.
2. Replies, 5 minutes. Every new review gets a sentence naming the job and the town.
3. Asking, 5 minutes. Compare reviews received against jobs completed, and text the link to whoever you missed.
4. One post, 5 minutes. Only if there is something real to say. Skip it otherwise.
5. Hours, 2 minutes. Add special hours for the next bank holiday before Google reminds you.
6. Edits, 3 minutes. Look for changes Google or the public have made to your categories, hours or name. It happens more than people realise.
7. Performance, 5 minutes. Calls, direction requests, website clicks, and the searches that found you. That report only holds about six months, so export it quarterly if you want a year-on-year view.

That is the entire routine, and it is the difference between a profile that keeps earning and one that quietly decays. Everything underneath it, the town pages, the site structure, the reason a competitor beats you on every term, sits in the wider local SEO checklist.

One honest closing note. If your profile is complete, your reviews are current and you still cannot get into the map pack, the profile has stopped being the problem. Distance and prominence are, and those need pages that earn their place and time, not another tick box. If you would rather I looked at yours and told you which of these is costing you most, send me the link.