Setting up Google Business Profile properly

The short answer

Google Business Profile is roughly a third of local ranking and costs nothing. The primary category is the most consequential field on it, and it is the one most businesses set carelessly.

Why this comes before website work

For a business with premises customers can visit, Google Business Profile is the single largest factor in local pack rankings, ahead of anything on your website. It is free, it takes an afternoon, and a surprising number of businesses either have not claimed theirs or completed it once and never returned.

If a listing for your business already exists that you did not create, claim it rather than creating a second one. Duplicate listings split your signals and both perform worse.

Getting the primary category right

The primary category is the most consequential decision in the whole profile. It largely determines which searches you are eligible to appear for, and choosing a vague one caps your visibility no matter what else you do.

Find the most specific category that genuinely describes your main business, not the broadest one that covers everything you do. A dental clinic should be a dental clinic, not a medical centre. Add the other things you do as secondary categories, where they carry far less weight but still help.

A useful check: search your main service in your town, open the top three listings, and look at their primary categories. That tells you what Google currently considers relevant for that query.

Completing the rest

None of these individually decides your ranking, but an incomplete profile competes against complete ones. Work through the list once properly and the rest is maintenance.

• Name: your actual business name. Adding keywords to it violates the guidelines and risks suspension.
• Address and service area: your real address if customers visit, or a service area if you travel to them.
• Hours: accurate, including holidays. Wrong hours generate genuinely damaging reviews.
• Phone: a number that is answered. Keep it identical to the number on your website.
• Photos: real photographs of the premises, team and work. Add new ones periodically rather than once at setup.
• Services and description: list each service individually, described in the words customers use.
• Website link: point it at the most relevant page, not always the homepage.

Reviews, without doing anything stupid

Review volume, recency and content all matter. Ask satisfied customers directly, at the moment the work is finished, with a link that takes them straight to the review form. That is legitimate and effective.

Do not buy reviews, do not write them yourself, and do not offer a discount in exchange for one. Google detects review manipulation and removes listings for it, and a suspended profile costs far more than the reviews were worth. Reply to every review, particularly the critical ones, because that reply is read by the next person deciding whether to call you.

If you have no physical address

Remote and online-only businesses cannot verify a Google Business Profile without an address, and using a home address you do not want public, or a fake one, is not a workaround. Google verifies by postcard, video or phone, and a listing built on a false address gets removed.

A service-area business, where you travel to customers, can register with a hidden address. A genuinely remote business with no address at all cannot, and the honest conclusion is that the map pack is not available to you. The effort belongs entirely in organic results instead: a properly structured site with a page for each real search intent, which is a slower route but not a blocked one.

Maintaining it

A profile completed once and abandoned decays. Post updates occasionally, add photos, keep hours correct through holidays, answer questions in the Q&A section, and reply to reviews. Freshness is a signal, and most of your local competitors will not bother.