Google Business Profile: The Free Thing Everyone Ignores
If people find you by searching for what you do near where they are, your Google Business Profile is doing more work than your homepage. It's free, it takes an afternoon to do properly, and the overwhelming majority we audit are somewhere between incomplete and neglected.
Complete it — genuinely completely
Primary category is the highest-impact single setting. Not the closest-sounding one — the exact one. "Cosmetic dentist" and "dentist" surface for different searches. Add secondary categories for what you also do, but the primary carries the most weight.
Services, listed individually, each with a description. This is a free surface for describing what you offer and most profiles leave it blank.
Hours, including holidays. Wrong hours generate the angriest reviews there are — someone drove to you and you were shut.
Photos, recent and real. Exterior (so people recognize it from the street), interior, team, work. Stock photography is transparent and does you no favours.
Attributes. Wheelchair accessible, parking, appointment required, languages spoken. Each one answers a question that would otherwise be a phone call — or a lost customer.
A description written for a person. Not keyword soup. What you do, who you serve, what makes you different.
Then keep it alive
Profiles reward activity, and activity is where nearly everyone stops.
Post weekly. Short. An offer, a piece of news, a photo of work you did. It takes five minutes.
Answer questions. Anyone can ask a question on your profile, and anyone can answer it — including people who don't work for you and don't know. Seed the common ones yourself and monitor the rest.
Reply to every review. Especially the negative ones, and especially calmly. Prospective customers read the response more carefully than the complaint, and a measured reply to an unfair review persuades better than a wall of five-star ratings.
Keep the details in sync with your site. Name, address, and phone identical everywhere, character for character.
Two things that cause real damage
Duplicate listings. Common after a move or a rebrand. They split your reviews and confuse the ranking. Find and merge them.
Address or category churn. Frequent changes look like a business that isn't stable. Change what needs changing and then leave it alone.
What to expect
Profile work usually shows movement within a few weeks — faster than almost anything else in search. It's the highest return-per-hour marketing available to a business with a front door, and its main competition is the fact that it's free, which makes people assume it can't matter much.
It does. Give it the afternoon.