Your Google Business Profile Is a Free Storefront

Pull up the numbers for a typical local business and you will usually find something uncomfortable: more people looked at the Google Business Profile last month than looked at the website. They saw the photos, read a review or two, checked the hours, and either tapped call or moved on to the next result. The website never came into it.

Which means the profile is not a directory listing. It is the storefront most of your customers see, and it is being run by a form somebody filled in once, three years ago, in a hurry.

The decision is being made on the profile, not on your site

Watch how someone actually chooses a local business on a phone. They search, they get three results on a map, they tap one, and they are looking at photos, a star rating, an opening-hours line and a call button, all without leaving the search results. If the profile answers their question, they call. If it does not, they tap back and look at the next one.

That whole sequence takes about fifteen seconds and your website appears in none of it. So the question worth asking is not whether your profile is claimed. It is whether the fifteen seconds someone spends on it does the job your best salesperson would do.

The five fields that actually move something

There are dozens of fields on a profile and they are not equally important. These five are where the return is.

The primary category, which is the biggest single lever

Your primary category tells Google which competition to enter you in. A business listed as a general contractor and a business listed as a bathroom remodeler are shown for different searches, and the second one is showing up for the search where people already know what they want.

Pick the most specific category that describes where your money comes from. Add secondary categories for the rest, but be honest: a long list of loosely related categories dilutes the signal rather than multiplying it. If you are unsure, search the term you want to win and look at what the three businesses in the map pack have chosen.

Services and products, listed individually

Every service you list is a phrase Google can match a search against, and each one can carry a short description and a price or a price range. Most profiles have none of this filled in, which means they are invisible for every search more specific than the category name.

This is tedious and it is worth an hour. Write out everything you do, in the words a customer would use rather than the words your trade uses, and add a sentence to each explaining what is included.

Photos, current and plentiful

Profiles with recent photos get engaged with more, and the reason is obvious once you look at a few: a business with eight photos from 2021 reads as a business that might not exist any more. Aim for the inside, the outside, the team, and the work itself, and add a few whenever you finish something you are pleased with.

The single most useful photo for a business with a physical location is the one that shows what your frontage looks like from the direction people approach. It is not glamorous. It stops people driving past.

Hours, including the special ones

Wrong hours are worse than no hours. Somebody drives over, finds you closed, and leaves a one-star review that will outlive the mistake by years. Set the holiday hours in advance, because Google will show a warning on your listing when it is not sure, and a listing that says hours might differ loses to one that does not.

The description and the questions

The description is your paragraph, not an ad. Say what you do, who you do it for, where, and what makes choosing you an easy decision. Then go to the questions section, which almost nobody looks at, and answer the five questions you get asked on the phone every week. You are allowed to ask and answer them yourself, and doing so puts the answers in the fifteen seconds where the decision happens.

Reviews are the window, and replies are the staff behind it

Reviews do two jobs at once. They are a ranking factor for the map pack, and they are the only part of the profile written by someone with nothing to sell. The second job matters more.

The pattern to aim for is a steady trickle, arriving all year, mentioning specific things. Ten reviews spread over ten months persuade more than forty that arrived in one fortnight, and reviews that name the actual service do more for search than five stars with no words.

You can help with that. When you ask, ask for something specific: what the job was, and whether it went the way they hoped. That question produces a review with detail in it instead of a nice, useless sentence.

Reply to every review within a few days. On the good ones, thank them and name the job. On the bad ones, be brief, be specific about what you will do, and never argue. A reader looking at a one-star review with a calm reply underneath tends to conclude the customer was having a bad day. A one-star review with no reply reads as a business that has stopped paying attention.

The parts of the profile nobody opens

• Posts. Short updates that appear on the profile: an offer, a new service, a seasonal note. They fade after a week or so, which is exactly why they signal that a business is active.
• Booking and enquiry links. If your site takes enquiries, the link belongs here, so the fifteen seconds can end with a form rather than a phone call for the people who would rather not ring.
• Attributes. Wheelchair access, parking, whether you are appointment only. Small, and they are the difference between a visit and a wasted trip.
• Messaging. Only switch it on if you will answer it. An unanswered message is a worse outcome than no messaging at all.

Fifteen minutes a month keeps it alive

None of this is a project. Once the fields are filled in, the profile needs a quarter of an hour a month: add two photos, reply to the reviews that arrived, put up one post, and check that nothing has been changed by a stranger. That last one is real. Anyone can suggest an edit to your listing, and edits sometimes go through.

Put that quarter of an hour in the monthly session described in The 30-Minute Marketing Week, next to the other slow structural jobs, and it will happen. Leave it to be remembered and it will not.

The profile is also only one of the four jobs that decide whether a local business gets found at all. The other three, service pages, review habits and consistent details, are laid out in Local SEO Without an Agency.

The honest limit of a profile

A profile will get you found and it will get you called. It will not tell a longer story, it cannot hold a portfolio, and you do not own it: the rules change, listings get suspended, and the whole thing sits on a platform that owes you nothing.

So treat it as the front door and not the house. The profile earns the fifteen seconds, the website earns the harder decisions, and the two should say the same thing about the same business. Most of the local businesses losing work are losing it because those two things disagree.