Google Business Profileoptimization, doneproperly once.
Your Google Business Profile is the most valuable free thing your business owns. Most of them get set up in about four minutes and never touched again.
The block thatproduces more callsthan everythingbelow it.
Your profile decides whether you appear in the map pack, the three-result block with a map that sits above the regular search results. For a local service business, that block produces more calls than everything below it combined.
It is also the one part of local search Google hosts for you, which is why it moves in weeks rather than months. You are not waiting on a website to earn authority. You are filling in a form that most of your competitors filled in badly.
This page is the work in full. If you want the wider discipline it sits inside, that is local SEO.
What is usually wrong with yours.
I audit these constantly. The same problems, nearly every time.
One category, when you needed five
Primary category is the strongest single ranking input on a profile. A business listed as “Contractor” instead of “Roofing Contractor” is competing in the wrong race. Secondary categories widen what you appear for, and most profiles have none.
No services listed
The services section lets you name every job you do. Empty on most profiles. Filling it is free and takes an hour.
Four photos from 2019
Profiles with recent photos added on a schedule outperform profiles that are visually frozen. Google can tell an active business from an abandoned listing.
Reviews that stopped two years ago
Recency and velocity matter alongside count. Forty reviews earned steadily beats forty earned in one week in 2023.
Nobody replies to reviews
Replying is a signal, and it is your only chance to answer a bad review in front of everyone who reads it next.
Wrong or conflicting information elsewhere
An old phone number on three directories quietly undermines the whole thing.
The work.
Categories and services
Primary category chosen against what ranks in your category in your city. Every relevant secondary. Full service list with descriptions.
Service area or address, set correctly
Service-area businesses hide the address and set a radius. Getting this wrong either limits your reach or gets the listing suspended.
Complete profile fields
Hours including holiday hours, attributes, opening date, description, products, booking links, and the messaging settings. Photos of real work, added monthly. Geo-tagging does nothing, whatever you have read.
Review generation as a system
The request goes out automatically after every completed job, by text or email, with a direct link. Reply templates written so responses take thirty seconds.
Citation cleanup
Name, address and phone made consistent across the directories that matter. Old and duplicate listings claimed or removed.
Q&A seeded, posts on a cadence
You can ask and answer questions on your own profile, and most businesses do not know this and leave the section for competitors and confused strangers to fill in. Google Posts every other week: small effect on ranking, real effect on the person deciding between you and the business next to you.
Reviews, since this is where most people are stuck.
The one reliable way to get reviews is to ask every customer, every time, right after the work is done, with a link that takes one tap.
A card left on the counter fails. Remembering to ask fails. Asking a week later fails, because the feeling has faded. Buying reviews fails and risks the listing.
Automating the ask is the whole solution, and it is usually a fifteen-minute setup inside your CRM.
On negative reviews: reply, publicly, without arguing. Say what happened, say what you did about it, and offer to sort it out offline. The reply is for the next forty people who read it.
What this is not
For most businesses this is a one-time project. I fix the profile properly, set up the review system, clean the citations, and hand it back to you with instructions.
Some clients keep me on for posts and monitoring. Plenty do not need to, and I would rather tell you that than bill you for reposting a photo every second Tuesday.
About Google Business Profile.
How do I rank higher on Google Maps?
Why is my Google Business Profile not showing up?
How do I get more Google reviews?
Can I remove a bad review?
Does my profile need a physical address?
How long until my profile ranks better?
Do I need to post on Google every week?
Works best alongside
Sources
- Relevance, distance and prominence, reviews helping local ranking, and no paying for position: https://support.google.com/business/answer/7091
- Google's review policy, for the removing-a-bad-review answer: https://support.google.com/business/answer/2622994
Get your profile audited.
Categories, services, photos, reviews and citations, checked against the three businesses ranking above you. Free, written down, and yours whether or not you hire me.