If someone searches for your business, there’s a good chance they’ll see your Google Business Profile before they ever visit your website.
They might be looking for your opening hours. They might want to check where you’re based, read a few reviews, look at photographs or find a phone number. They may even make a decision about whether to contact you without visiting your website at all.
That makes your Google Business Profile much more than an online directory listing.
It is part of your customer journey.
Your profile is often one of the first impressions someone has of your business, so it needs to be accurate, useful and representative of the experience you actually provide.
The good news is that you don’t need to be an SEO expert to get the basics right. In fact, most of the most useful improvements are straightforward.
Here’s where I’d start.
Claim and verify your profile
Before you do anything else, make sure you have claimed and verified your Google Business Profile.
This gives you control over the information customers see and allows you to manage important details such as your opening hours, telephone number, website, photographs, services and reviews.
It also gives you a better opportunity to spot and correct information that is inaccurate or out of date.
Your profile should represent your real-world business accurately. That includes using your genuine business name rather than adding extra keywords in an attempt to appear for more searches. Google specifically advises businesses to use the name by which they are consistently represented in the real world.
If you’ve never claimed your profile, that’s the place to start.
Get the basics right
This sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly easy for important information to become outdated.
Work through your profile and check:
- Business name
- Primary category
- Additional categories where genuinely appropriate
- Address or service area
- Telephone number
- Website address
- Opening hours
- Special or holiday opening hours
- Relevant business attributes
- Booking, enquiry or contact links where appropriate
The principle is simple: don’t make customers hunt for basic information.
If someone wants to know whether you’re open, where you’re located or how to contact you, the answer should be immediately available.
Google also recommends keeping your Business Profile information complete and accurate because this helps Google understand your business and can improve your eligibility for relevant local searches.
It’s worth remembering that Google can also use information from other sources, including your website, third-party data and information contributed by users. Your profile isn’t necessarily the only source Google uses when building its understanding of your business.
That makes consistency important.
Choose the right primary category
Your primary category tells Google what your business actually is.
That distinction matters.
If you’re a wedding photographer, your primary category should describe you as a wedding photographer rather than trying to squeeze every service you offer into the category field.
Google’s own guidance is to choose the fewest categories needed to describe your overall core business, using the most specific category available. Categories should describe what your business is, rather than what it happens to offer or have.
You can add additional categories where they’re genuinely relevant, but don’t treat them as a list of keywords.
Think about the question:
“What would I call this business if I had to describe it in one sentence?”
That’s a much better starting point for choosing your primary category than asking:
“Which categories can I add to try to rank for more searches?”
Write for customers, not Google
Your business description has a simple job: help someone understand what you do and why your business might be relevant to them.
Explain:
- What you do
- Who you help
- Where you operate
- What makes your business useful or different
Avoid stuffing the description with variations of keywords such as “business consultant, business consultancy, business advisor, business strategy consultant…” It makes the copy harder to read and doesn’t create a better customer experience.
Google’s guidance is similarly straightforward: descriptions should provide useful information about the services or products you offer, along with relevant information about your business, its mission or its history. Promotional offers, prices and links aren’t appropriate here.
Write it as though you’re explaining your business to a potential customer.
That’s usually good SEO advice too.
Give your profile some personality with good photography
Imagine finding two local businesses on Google.
One has a logo and a couple of dark, dated photographs.
The other has clear, current images showing the premises, the people, the products and the experience you can expect.
Which one would you feel more comfortable contacting?
Your Google profile shouldn’t look like an abandoned directory listing.
Photography is part of the customer experience. It helps people understand what they’re going to encounter before they make contact.
Depending on your type of business, consider including:
Exterior photographs
Help customers recognise your premises when they arrive.
Interior photographs
Show what the environment actually looks and feels like.
Products or services
Give people a visual understanding of what you sell or the work you provide.
People and team photographs
Where appropriate, show the people behind the business. This can be particularly valuable for service businesses where trust is an important part of the buying decision.
Google recommends clear, well-lit photographs that accurately represent reality, rather than heavily filtered or significantly altered imagery. Its guidance also suggests using different types of photographs to help customers understand the business and what it offers.
You don’t need a professional photoshoot for every profile. You do need photographs that are current, useful and representative.
Reviews are about more than the star rating
Reviews matter, but I’d avoid reducing your review strategy to:
“Get more five-star reviews.”
The number, quality and recency of your reviews can all contribute to how established your business appears. Google identifies review information as one of the signals that can contribute to local prominence.
More importantly, reviews tell prospective customers what it’s actually like to deal with you.
Look beyond the stars.
What do customers repeatedly mention?
Do they praise your communication?
Your expertise?
Your speed?
Your attention to detail?
Your friendliness?
The quality of your work?
Those recurring themes can tell you a great deal about what customers value. They can also provide useful language that you can reflect elsewhere in your website and marketing.
Respond to reviews too, including less positive ones where appropriate. A thoughtful response demonstrates that you’re paying attention.
Don’t incentivise, manufacture or manipulate reviews. Genuine customer experiences are far more valuable than a collection of suspiciously similar five-star comments.
Make your Google profile and website work together
Your Google Business Profile and website shouldn’t feel like two completely separate versions of your business.
They should tell the same story.
Check that:
- Your business name is consistent
- Your contact details are consistent
- Your services are reflected across both
- Your location information agrees
- Your website link works
- Relevant profile links lead to useful pages
- The website works properly on mobile
This is particularly important when someone discovers you through Google and then clicks through to your website.
Imagine searching for a local service, finding a profile that looks professional and then landing on a website that is slow, outdated or difficult to navigate.
The Google profile did its job.
The wider customer journey didn’t.
That’s why local visibility shouldn’t be viewed as a Google Business Profile exercise in isolation. Your profile, website, social presence, reviews and wider digital experience all contribute to the impression someone forms of your business.
Keep the information current
Businesses change.
Opening hours change. Services change. Teams change. Businesses move. Contact details change.
Your Google Business Profile needs to keep pace.
Make a habit of checking the important information periodically, particularly before bank holidays or other periods when your normal opening hours might change.
Google allows businesses to add special hours for holidays and temporary changes, so customers can get a more accurate picture of when you’re available.
You can also use Google Posts where they’re useful for sharing timely information, but don’t feel that you need to turn your profile into another social media channel simply for the sake of activity.
The priority is accuracy and usefulness.
Don’t obsess over rankings
This is perhaps the most important point.
You cannot simply optimise your Google Business Profile and guarantee that you’ll appear at number one for every local search.
Google says local results are primarily influenced by three broad factors: relevance, distance and prominence.
Relevance
Does your business match what the person is looking for?
If someone searches for a wedding photographer, Google needs to understand which businesses actually provide that service.
Complete, accurate information helps Google understand what you do.
Distance
How close is your business to the person searching, or to the location they’re searching for?
This is one reason local results can look different depending on where the search is made.
Prominence
How established and well-known does your business appear to be?
Google considers information from across the web when assessing businesses, including things such as links and reviews.
There is no magic setting that overrides these factors. Google explicitly states that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.
So don’t fall into the trap of constantly tweaking your profile in the hope of finding the perfect combination of keywords.
A better goal is to make your business easy for both Google and your customers to understand.
That means accurate information, a clear description, appropriate categories, useful photographs, genuine reviews and a website that backs everything up.
Your 15-minute Google Business Profile check
If you haven’t looked at your profile recently, set aside 15 minutes and work through this list.
- Profile claimed and verified
- Business name is correct
- Primary category accurately describes the business
- Additional categories are relevant
- Services or products are up to date
- Opening hours are correct
- Special or holiday hours are up to date where necessary
- Website link works
- Telephone number is correct
- Business description accurately reflects what you do
- Exterior photographs are current
- Interior photographs are current where relevant
- Product or service photographs are current
- Reviews are being monitored and responded to
- No outdated or misleading information remains
- Information on your website agrees with your Google profile
You don’t need to complete everything perfectly in one sitting.
The important thing is to start treating your Google Business Profile as something that deserves the same attention as the rest of your customer-facing presence.
Your Google Business Profile is part of your customer journey
Your Google Business Profile might be the first interaction someone has with your business.
For some customers, it could also be the last step before they call, book, visit or buy.
That means it deserves more thought than simply entering your address and hoping Google does the rest.
Your profile, website, social media and wider customer experience should work together to give people a clear and consistent reason to choose you.
Your Google Business Profile is just one part of that journey.
If your Google presence, website, branding and customer experience don’t quite feel connected, that’s something Filament can help with.
Book your free discovery call and let’s look at where your customer journey could be working harder for your business.