How to Optimise Your Google Business Profile for Local SEO
Most listings underperform for dull reasons rather than sophisticated ones. This guide covers every part of the profile in the order that actually matters, which means a reader who stops after three blocks has already taken most of the available benefit.
Complete Beats Clever
Almost every underperforming listing we take over is not badly optimised. It is half filled in. One category, two services, whatever photographs Google found somewhere and hours that were right in 2022. Finishing the basics outperforms every technique anybody will sell you on top of them.
Why this is the case. Nothing exotic is happening.
The listing is a set of information about a business. The more of it is present and accurate, the more searches it can plausibly answer and the easier it is for a person to choose you.
What that means for your afternoon. Boring work first.
Categories, services, hours and photographs before anything anybody described as a strategy. The unglamorous version is the one that produces the calls.
Why the industry does not lead with this. It is not sellable.
Nobody builds a package around filling in the fields properly, so the conversation drifts towards posting schedules and tactics that sound more like work.
How this page is organised. By effect, not by menu order.
The blocks follow the order we would work in rather than the order the fields appear on screen. That ordering is the most valuable thing here, which is what block two is about.
What Actually Moves A Listing
Four things, in this order. Category first, then the information a customer needs to decide, then reviews, then activity. Everything below follows that sequence. Doing them out of order wastes effort on the later ones while the earlier ones are still wrong.
First, category. Eligibility.
It determines which searches the listing can appear for at all. Nothing further down compensates for having this wrong, which is why it gets the fullest block on the page.
Second, the information a customer needs. Services, hours, contact details.
What you do, when you are open and how to reach you. This is where relevance is built and where most listings are thinnest.
Third, reviews. The part you influence rather than control.
Volume, recency and how you respond. Our reviews material owns this properly and block fourteen explains why it sits here in the order.
Fourth, activity. Photographs, posts and answered questions.
Worth doing and last for a reason. This is where businesses start, which is precisely why so many of them see nothing for the effort.
Where the published factors fit. Three of them.
Distance, relevance and prominence, which the ranking factors guide covers. Category and services build relevance. Reviews build prominence. Distance is fixed, which shapes everything else on this page.
Categories
The primary category does more than any other single setting to determine what your listing can appear for. If you change one thing after reading this page, change this. Take your time over it.
Primary and secondary are not equal. Not remotely.
The primary carries far more weight in what the listing is understood to be. Secondary categories add supporting detail. Businesses regularly put their real trade in a secondary slot and wonder why nothing works.
The rule. Choose what you are.
Not what you would like to rank for. A category describing something you dabble in competes against businesses that do only that. It also costs you the searches you should have owned.
Be as specific as the list allows. Specific beats broad.
Where a precise category exists for your trade, take it. Sitting under a general heading when a specific one is available is the commonest category error among the trades by a distance.
The method that actually works. Look at who is already there.
Search the terms that matter to you and look at what the listings appearing under them use. That tells you more in ten minutes than reading the whole category list does.
Changing it later. Deliberately.
Category changes can trigger a fresh review of the listing, so make one considered change rather than experimenting weekly. The setup guide covers why this sits alongside name and address as a consequential field.
Attributes
Attributes are how a listing gets matched to filtered and qualified searches, which is where intent is highest. Somebody filtering for a specific requirement has already decided what they want. A listing missing that attribute is not in the running.
What they are. Descriptive settings.
Practical facts about the business, such as accessibility, payment arrangements, appointment requirements and whether particular provisions exist. The available set depends on your category.
Why they matter more than their prominence suggests. Filters.
These are what somebody narrowing results is using. A filter applied removes every listing without the attribute regardless of how good it is otherwise.
Where some of them come from. Not you.
Some attributes are set by the business and others are derived from customer feedback over time. You control one half and influence the other.
The rule. Only claim what is true.
An inaccurate attribute produces a customer who arrives to find something missing, which costs you more than the search you won. Accessibility claims are the ones where this matters most.
Products And Services
This is where a business lists what it actually does, in its own words rather than from a menu. Most trades list two things and stop. A plumber whose services list says plumbing has said almost nothing about itself.
What to list. The jobs customers actually ask for.
Boiler repairs, unvented cylinder servicing, bathroom installations, emergency leak repairs, power flushing. The phrasing customers use rather than trade terminology.
Use the descriptions. Each one takes its own.
Every service can carry a short description. Almost nobody fills them in. Two lines explaining what the job involves and who it suits is more than most competitors have.
How many to add. More than you think.
If you do fifteen distinct things, list fifteen. This is the one field where thoroughness is genuinely rewarded and where the work is entirely within your control.
What not to do. Stuff towns into it.
Service names are for services rather than for places. Adding a town to each one reads badly and does not achieve the geographic reach people hope for, which block sixteen covers.
The Description
Businesses spend more time on this than on anything else and it is not used the way they assume. It is not a ranking field, so stuffing services and towns into it achieves nothing beyond making it unpleasant to read.
What it is actually for. The choice between two listings.
Somebody comparing you with the business next to you reads it to decide which feels more like the right call. That is a persuasion job rather than a keyword job.
What to put at the front. The thing that distinguishes you.
Only the first part shows before somebody expands it, so whatever matters most belongs at the beginning. We are not quoting a character rule here, because the useful discipline is front loading rather than counting.
What gets it rejected. Four things.
Offers, prices, links and shouting in capitals. All of them are against the rules for this field. A rejected description simply does not appear.
What good looks like. What you do, for whom, from where.
A few sentences a customer would recognise as accurate. Read it aloud. If it sounds like marketing rather than like your business, rewrite it.
Opening Hours
Wrong hours cost more than a ranking, because a customer arrives at a closed door or rings a phone nobody answers. That is a lost job and a poor impression at the same time. It is entirely avoidable.
The filter nobody thinks about. Open now.
People filter results by what is open at that moment. A listing with no hours set is excluded from that filter without any warning. So is one whose hours are wrong.
The half nobody sets. Special hours.
Bank holidays, Christmas closures and the fortnight in August when the yard is shut. These can be entered in advance and almost nobody does it, which is why so many listings claim to be open on Boxing Day.
The rule we apply. Hours advertised are hours somebody answers.
If the listing says open until eight, somebody picks up until eight. Setting generous hours to look available produces missed calls, which is worse than a shorter accurate window.
When to review it. Twice a year, plus holidays.
This is the most administrative task on the page and the one clients thank us for most, because it prevents the complaint nobody would otherwise trace back to a listing.
Photographs
Photographs affect whether somebody chooses you rather than whether you appear. We are not going to claim they lift your position, because that is not established. What they do is decide the moment where two listings sit side by side.
What you do not control. Which ones show.
The profile selects what appears from everything available, including images customers have added. You are contributing to a pool rather than designing a gallery.
What beats what. Real beats stock.
Actual photographs of your premises, your team and your work outperform library imagery, which readers spot instantly. A slightly imperfect real photograph is worth more than a polished generic one.
Where the trades go wrong. Best material, least used.
Plumbers, roofers, joiners and landscapers have before and after photographs on their phones that would sell the business on their own. Almost none of it ever reaches the listing.
What to do. A handful, kept current.
A small set of genuine recent photographs is worth more than forty from a decade ago. Add to it as you finish jobs rather than treating it as a one off task.
Posts
Posts are not a ranking lever. Anybody selling them on that basis is overstating what they do. That is worth saying first, because posting schedules are one of the most commonly sold items in local marketing.
Who sees them. Somebody already looking at you.
They appear to people viewing your listing rather than pulling new people towards it. That is a narrower audience and a genuinely good moment, since the person is mid decision.
What is worth posting. Things that help that decision.
Current availability, a job you have just finished, a seasonal service, a genuine offer or a note about holiday cover. Specific and useful rather than filler.
What they do. They expire.
Posts drop away after a period, so this is an ongoing task rather than a permanent addition. Anything you want to stay belongs in services or in the description.
The risk nobody mentions. Abandonment shows.
A listing whose last post was fourteen months ago looks neglected in a way that no posts at all does not. Starting is a commitment rather than a task.
The Questions And Answers Section
Anybody can answer a question about your business. Not you. Anybody. A wrong answer left by a stranger can sit at the top of your listing indefinitely, being read by every customer who looks you up.
Why nobody notices. Notifications are unreliable.
You cannot depend on being told when a question is asked or answered. This needs checking deliberately rather than waiting for an alert that may not arrive.
What you are allowed to do. Ask and answer yourself.
A business can post the questions it genuinely gets and answer them properly. That is legitimate, useful to customers and it puts accurate information at the top rather than leaving the space open.
What to post. The five you are asked weekly.
Whether you cover a particular area, whether you charge for callouts, how quickly you can attend, what payment you take and whether the work is guaranteed.
What to check monthly. New answers.
Look for anything added since last time, correct what is wrong and report anything abusive. Fifteen minutes a month. It is also the block most businesses have never read.
Messaging
The first rule of messaging is not to enable it unless somebody will answer it. Response times are visible, so a channel nobody watches advertises the fact rather than hiding it.
What customers ask through it. Three things.
Availability, price and whether you cover their area. Nearly always one of those, which makes it a fairly simple channel to staff if somebody is willing.
Why it suits some trades and not others. Hands.
Somebody under a sink cannot reply to messages, whereas a salon receptionist can. Be realistic about which of those describes your day.
What good use looks like. Fast and short.
A quick reply that answers the question and moves to a call. The objective is a conversation rather than a text exchange lasting three days.
Turning it off is a legitimate choice. Genuinely.
Routing people to the phone is a decision rather than a failure. It is the right one for plenty of trades. An unanswered message is worse than a channel that was never offered.
Service Businesses Without Premises
Local results favour businesses near the person searching. A business that travels has no shopfront to be near, so it starts at a disadvantage against anybody with a unit on the high street. That is by design rather than a fault to be fixed.
What the correct setting is. Enter the address and hide it.
A business that does not serve customers at its address hides it and sets a service area. That is the proper configuration rather than a workaround. It is what Google provides for exactly this situation.
Why showing a home address is worse. Two reasons.
It puts your house on the map for every passing stranger. It also does not buy you the proximity advantage people imagine, since the listing behaves differently from a premises listing anyway.
Setting the service area. Where you genuinely work.
An enormous radius does not extend your reach and it can look implausible to a customer reading it. List the places you would actually take a job in this week.
What this does not mean. Give up on the profile.
The disadvantage is real and it is not fatal. The ranking factors guide explains which of the three published factors you can influence. Block thirteen covers what to do about it.
What Works Instead When You Have No Shopfront
With no premises signal to lean on, everything else carries proportionally more weight. That is the useful way to think about it, because it tells you exactly where to put the effort rather than leaving you resenting the disadvantage.
A complete profile. Non negotiable here.
Every field filled in properly matters more for you than for a business with a shopfront, because you have fewer signals working in your favour to begin with.
A strong services list. Your best available lever.
Fifteen genuine services with descriptions, in customer language. This is the field where a mobile trade can outwork a competitor with premises.
Reviews mentioning places. The quiet advantage.
Reviews that name the job and the town read naturally and tell a reader you work there. Asking a slightly better question produces them, which our reviews material covers.
Photographs of jobs across the area. Evidence you travel.
Work in different places demonstrates the geography of the business more convincingly than any setting does.
A website with genuine location pages. The part that scales.
Real pages about the places you work, with substance rather than a town name swapped out. That is where the reach comes from and it is the subject of block sixteen.
Reviews Are The Half You Do Not Control Directly
Reviews sit third in the ordering rather than first. That placement is deliberate. They matter enormously and they are slower to move than the fields above, so a listing with the wrong category and forty reviews still underperforms.
Why they sit here. Sequence.
Reviews improve a listing that is already eligible and informative. Gathering them while your category is wrong is pouring effort into a listing that cannot appear for the right searches.
What they affect. Both things.
Whether the listing appears, through prominence, plus whether somebody picks it once it does. The second effect is larger and more immediate than most businesses expect.
What we will not tell you. A number.
There is no review count that unlocks anything. Anybody quoting one is inventing it. The useful comparison is against the businesses competing for your searches in your area.
Where the whole subject lives. Three pages.
Do Google reviews help SEO covers what is genuinely known, plus the rules that govern all of this. Generating them and responding to them have their own guides.
What Does Not Work
Four things get recommended constantly and none of them survives contact with reality. Two are merely ineffective. Two put your listing at risk of disappearing altogether.
Keywords stuffed into the business name. The classic.
Against the guidelines, extremely common and the easiest thing in the world for a competitor to report. The suspension guide explains why this is the biggest single cause we see.
Categories chosen for reach rather than accuracy. Self defeating.
Sitting under categories you do not belong in dilutes what the listing is understood to be and costs you the searches you should win.
Fake activity. Reviews, questions, engagement.
Reviews from people who were never customers, questions answered by staff pretending to be the public, plus anything else manufactured. Detectable, prohibited and we will not do it whatever a client asks.
And the address rules, absolutely. No exceptions.
No listings at addresses that are not genuine places of business. No virtual offices. No mailboxes. No relatives' addresses. No listing per town you cover. These are the commonest suspension causes and our material on locksmiths carries the same position, because that trade has the worst collective record for it.
The Website Does The Geography
Reaching towns where you have no premises is a website job rather than a profile job. No amount of work on the listing substitutes for it. Understanding that saves you from buying things that cannot deliver what they promise.
Why the profile cannot do it. Distance is fixed.
Local results favour businesses near the searcher. Nothing in the profile changes where you are. That is the ceiling on what this page can achieve for you.
Why the website can. Different results.
Ordinary search results are not governed by proximity in the same way, so a page that genuinely serves somebody searching in a particular town can rank for it whether you have premises there or not.
What a genuine location page is. Not a template.
Real content about working in that area, the jobs you do there, the properties and problems typical of it and the customers you have served. Our location page material covers the standard, including where thin duplicated pages cross the line.
What that means for your money. Split it properly.
Get the profile complete because it is free and effective near you. Then spend on the website, because that is what extends the business outwards and it is an asset nobody can suspend.
It Needs Maintaining, Not Finishing
A profile is not a project with an end. Hours change, services change, photographs age and strangers answer questions about you. Left alone for a year, a properly completed listing drifts back towards being wrong.
What goes stale first. Hours.
Bank holidays, seasonal changes and the week you close in summer. This is the item that costs actual jobs when it is wrong.
What accumulates without you. Questions and photographs.
Both can be added by other people. Checking what has appeared is the part of the work nobody thinks to ask for and the part that prevents the worst surprises.
What real monthly work looks like. Unglamorous.
Check hours ahead of holidays, add photographs from recent jobs, keep the services list current, read new questions, respond to reviews and note anything that has changed. That is the job.
Why we describe it plainly. You should know what you are buying.
Anybody charging monthly for profile management should be doing roughly the above. If the reporting shows posts and nothing else, ask what happened to the rest of it. The full series sits on the Google Business Profile guide.
Complete beats
clever. Then
somebody has
to maintain it.
Most listings we take over are missing the same things, in the same order. Category accuracy, a proper services list, hours that survive a bank holiday and photographs from this year rather than the last decade. None of it is complicated and all of it goes stale if nobody owns it.
What we do every month:
If reaching other towns is your constraint, we will tell you that is a website job rather than sell you more profile work.
Every guide.
One profile.
Getting set up, claiming and verifying, optimising the listing properly, suspensions and reinstatement, reviews, reading the performance data and appearing in the local pack and in Maps.
