Thirty-five guides on the free listing that decides most local searches

Google Business Profile Guide

Setting one up, filling it in properly, getting reviews, appearing in the map plus fixing it when it disappears. Across every trade we have measured, more local demand is settled here than anywhere on your website.

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35 guides
Eight sections
Managed on every plan

Your Google Business Profile is free, takes an afternoon to set up properly plus decides more local enquiries than your entire website. Every trade we have measured tells the same story: when somebody searches for a business near them, the map results settle it. Most profiles we take over have one category, no services listed, a handful of photographs from three years ago plus a review request process that does not exist. Fixing that is the first thing we do on any account, before anybody writes a word of content.

Start Here

What Is Google My Business?

Start here if the names have confused you, because they confuse everybody. Google My Business is what the product used to be called plus the name most people still search for. It is now Google Business Profile, the tool has moved and the management app has gone. This explains what the listing is, what it does plus why so much guidance you will find online refers to buttons that no longer exist.

Read the explainer
Four steps, in this order

Names And Getting Started

Adding, claiming plus verifying are three different jobs that people assume are one. A listing can exist without being claimed, be claimed without being verified plus be verified without being any good, which is where most of this cluster comes in.

Same Thing, New Name

What Is the Difference Between Google My Business and Google Business Profile?

Short answer, none. It is a rename plus a change in where you manage it. The longer answer explains what actually moved, which matters when following older instructions.

The rename, explained Read the guide → Creating A Listing

How Do I Add My Business to Google?

Creating a listing from nothing plus setting it up correctly first time. Covers the full setup rather than only the adding, since a listing created badly takes longer to fix than to build properly.

Add plus set up Read the guide → It May Already Exist

How to Claim Your Google Business Profile

Google frequently creates a listing for a business before the owner does anything. Claiming takes control of what is already showing, which is a different job to creating one from scratch.

Taking control of an existing listing Read the guide → The Gate

How to Verify Your Google Business Profile

Until a listing is verified, most of what you change does not stick. Covers the verification methods, which one you are likely to get plus what to do when the postcard never arrives.

Nothing works until this is done Read the guide →
Where nearly every profile falls short

Filling It In Properly

The largest group here plus the one that does the most work. A complete profile outranks an incomplete one from the same street, plus completeness is not a vague quality, it is a list of fields somebody either filled in or did not.

Read the category guide even if you read nothing else. Choosing the wrong primary category is the single most common fault we find, plus it quietly caps everything else you do.

The Whole Job

How to Optimise Your Google Business Profile for Local SEO

The complete optimisation guide, covering every field and how each one contributes. The page to work through end to end if you are taking a neglected listing in hand.

Every field, in order Read the guide → The Most Common Fault

How to Choose the Right Business Category in Google Business Profile

Category is a core local ranking factor plus the field most often left on whatever was picked in a hurry. How to choose a primary category, how many secondary ones to add plus why listing each service separately matters.

A core ranking factor Read the guide → 750 Characters

How to Write a Google Business Profile Description That Ranks

What to say in the space you get, what Google will reject plus how to write something that reads like a business rather than a keyword list. Short, plus worth doing carefully for that reason.

Small field, real effect Read the guide → Filters People Actually Use

What Are Google Business Profile Attributes and How Do They Affect Rankings?

Wheelchair access, parking, whether you are women-owned, whether you take card. Small tick boxes that become filters somebody searching can apply, which makes them worth more than their size suggests.

Tick boxes that filter results Read the guide → Each One Is A Search

How to Add Products and Services to Google Business Profile

Listing what you actually do, individually, rather than relying on the category to imply it. Every service added is another search the listing can appear for, plus this is free.

List them separately Read the guide → Which Ones, Plus How Many

How to Add Photos to Google Business Profile for Better Rankings

What to photograph, which types matter most, how often to add them plus why the images already on your phone beat anything from a stock library. Covers the best photo types in the same guide.

Includes the best photo types Read the guide → Including The Awkward Ones

How to Add Opening Hours to Google Business Profile

Regular hours, special hours plus what to do about bank holidays. Dull, plus a profile showing the wrong hours over Christmas costs real trade while nobody notices.

Keep them current Read the guide →
Two situations the standard advice ignores

If You Are Not A Shopfront

Most guidance on this subject assumes a business with a door the public walks through. A great many are not, plus the setup for those is genuinely different rather than merely a variation.

If You Travel To Customers

How Can Service Based Businesses Optimise Their Google Business Profile?

Setting up as a service area business, hiding a home address plus defining the towns you cover. This one issue stops more tradespeople having a listing at all than anything else.

Service area setup Read the guide → More Than One Branch

How to Handle Multiple Locations on Google Business Profile

Managing several listings without them competing, keeping details consistent across all of them plus how the structure should look. Considerably harder than running one, plus frequently done badly.

Several listings, one business Read the guide →
A profile is a channel, not a form

Using It Actively

Three features most businesses never touch. None of them is essential, plus a listing that shows recent activity behaves differently to one that was completed once and left alone.

Free, Plus Almost Unused

How to Use Google Business Profile Posts to Improve Visibility

Short updates that appear on your listing. What to post, how often plus what happens when you stop. We manage these for clients because almost nobody keeps them going alone.

We run these for clients Read the guide → Only If You Will Answer

How to Set Up Google Business Profile Messaging

Letting people message you directly from the listing. Genuinely useful for anybody who cannot always answer the phone, plus worth switching off entirely if messages will sit unanswered for days.

Useful, with a condition Read the guide → Anybody Can Answer It

What Is the Google Business Profile Q and A Section and How Do You Use It?

The part of your listing the public can write on. You can seed it with your own questions plus you should, because the alternative is a stranger answering on your behalf.

Answer it before somebody else does Read the guide →
The biggest subject here, by a distance

Reviews

Seven guides, because reviews do more for a local listing than any other single factor you can influence plus they generate more questions than everything else combined.

The short version: ask everybody, on a schedule, plus reply to all of them including the bad ones. Everything below is the detail behind that.

Start Here

Do Google Reviews Help SEO?

What reviews actually contribute to local rankings plus how the star rating itself factors in. Covers both the count and the average, since people usually ask about one and mean the other.

Count plus rating Read the guide → The Practical One

How to Get More Google Reviews for Your Business

Asking properly, when to ask, what to send plus what you are not allowed to do. Most businesses have far fewer reviews than they have satisfied customers, plus the gap is simply that nobody asks.

Ask on a schedule Read the guide → The Number Question

How Many Google Reviews Do You Need to Rank Locally?

There is no threshold, plus there is a useful answer, which is how you compare against the businesses currently above you in your own town. Also covers why recency matters as much as volume.

Relative, not absolute Read the guide → Reply To All Of Them

How to Respond to Google Reviews

What to say, how quickly plus why replying to the good ones matters too. A prospective customer reads the replies more carefully than the reviews, since that is where they learn how you behave.

Including the positive ones Read the guide → The One That Matters Most

How to Respond to Negative Google Reviews

How to reply without making it worse, when to take it offline plus what a good response looks like to the hundred people reading it who were not involved. A well handled bad review sells better than a bland good one.

Written for the readers, not the reviewer Read the guide → When It Is Not A Customer

How to Report a Fake Google Review

What counts as a policy breach, how to report it plus what realistically happens next. Worth knowing the difference between a review you dislike and one that genuinely breaks the rules.

The reporting process Read the guide → Usually Not

Can You Remove a Google Review?

The plain answer to the question every business owner asks after a bad week. What can be removed, what cannot plus why the energy is better spent on the reply and on the next twenty reviews.

What is actually possible Read the guide →
Where the enquiries actually come from

Ranking In The Map

Four guides on the three results Google shows above everything else. Every trade we have measured settles most of its near-me demand here rather than on anybody's website, which is why the listing work comes before the content work on every account we run.

The Three Results

What Is the Google Local Pack and How Do You Get in It?

What the map pack is, how it is put together plus the part your profile plays in it. If you are not in these three results, a great deal of local searching never reaches you at all.

Includes the role of your profile Read the guide → The Three Factors

How Does Google Decide Which Businesses Appear in the Local Pack?

Distance, relevance and prominence, all three in one guide. Distance you cannot change. Relevance is almost entirely in your control plus it is where most of the available gain sits. Prominence comes mostly from reviews.

Distance, relevance plus prominence Read the guide → The Discipline

What Is Google Maps SEO and How Does It Work?

What the work involves as a discipline, how it differs from ordinary search work plus which parts of it sit on your listing rather than your website.

Listing work against site work Read the guide → The Practical Version

How to Rank Higher in Google Maps

What actually moves a listing up, in the order worth doing it. Categories and services first, then reviews, then photographs and activity. Nothing here costs money.

In priority order Read the guide →
Free data almost nobody opens

Measuring It

Your profile reports what people searched to find you, what they did next plus how many rang. That is better attribution than most paid tools give you, plus it sits behind a tab most owners have never clicked.

Renamed, Same Data

What Is Google Business Profile Insights?

What the reporting shows plus how to read it. Also covers the rename to Performance, which is why half the guidance online describes a screen you cannot find.

Insights and Performance Read the guide → Data Into Decisions

How to Use Google Business Profile Insights to Improve Local SEO

Turning the numbers into changes: which searches you are appearing for that you did not expect, which you are missing plus what that tells you to add to the listing.

What to change, based on what you see Read the guide → Proving It Works

How to Track Calls From Your Google Business Profile

Knowing how many calls the listing produced rather than guessing. The clearest answer available to the question of whether any of this is working.

Attribution that is actually reliable Read the guide →
Four guides for a bad week

When Something Is Wrong

A listing can vanish, get suspended or simply never appear where you expect it. Each of those has a different cause plus a different fix, so establish which one you have before changing anything.

Start Here

Why Is My Business Not Showing Up on Google?

The diagnosis page. Unverified, suspended, duplicated, wrongly categorised or simply outranked, plus how to tell which. A great deal of what feels like a disaster is one unticked box.

Work out which problem you have Read the guide → Why It Happens

What Is a Google Business Profile Suspension and How Do You Avoid It?

What triggers a suspension, which of those are accidental plus how to avoid the common ones. Frequently caused by an address change, a category change or editing several fields at once.

Mostly avoidable Read the guide → Recovery Work

How to Reinstate a Suspended Google Business Profile

The reinstatement process, what evidence to gather plus how long it takes. Slow, procedural plus entirely doable. The worst thing you can do is submit repeatedly without changing anything.

Procedural, plus doable Read the guide → Duplicates And Closures

How to Remove a Duplicate or Closed Listing From Google

The legitimate reasons to take a listing down: a duplicate competing with your real one, a branch that has closed plus an address you have moved from. Duplicates in particular hold back the listing you want people to find.

Cleanup, not removal Read the guide →
Managed on every plan, from £350 a month

This Is The First Thing We Fix.

Before anybody writes a word of content for you, we go through the listing: primary category corrected, every service listed separately, service area defined properly, hours that match reality, photographs added plus a review process that actually runs. On most accounts it is where the phone starts moving first, because it is where most local searching is settled.

What we manage on your listing:

Categories and services Service area and hours Photographs and posts A review programme that runs Replies to every review Monthly reporting on calls
£350per month

One clear retainer. No setup fee. The listing stays yours.

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Using these guides

Frequently Asked

Where should I start?
If you have no listing, start with adding your business. If you have one, go straight to the category guide, since the wrong primary category quietly caps everything else. Then reviews. Those two between them account for most of what separates a listing that ranks from one that does not.
Is my Google Business Profile really more important than my website?
For local searching, frequently yes. Across every trade we have measured, the majority of near-me demand is settled in the map results rather than on anybody's website. Your site still matters enormously, plus it matters at a different moment: somebody taps your map listing, lands on the site and decides in a few seconds whether you look like a real business that does their job. Both, in that order.
I work from home. Can I still have a listing?
Yes, plus this stops more tradespeople having a listing at all than any other single issue. Set up as a service area business, hide the address plus list the towns you cover. The service based businesses guide covers it. Having no listing because you did not want your address published is the most expensive possible way to solve that problem.
How many reviews do I actually need?
There is no threshold, so the useful question is how you compare with the businesses currently above you in your own town. If they have forty and you have six, that is your answer. Recency counts as well as volume, since a five star average whose last review is two years old reads as a business that stopped asking. The reviews and ranking guide covers it.
Can I get a bad review taken down?
Usually not, plus that is worth accepting early. Google removes reviews that breach its policies rather than reviews a business dislikes, so unless it is fake, abusive or from somebody who was never a customer, it stays. Replying well is the better use of the energy, since a bad review handled gracefully sells better to the next reader than a bland good one does.
My listing has been suspended. What now?
Do not resubmit repeatedly, which is the instinct plus makes it worse. Work out what triggered it first, since suspensions are frequently caused by something ordinary like an address change or editing several fields at once. The suspension guide covers the causes and the reinstatement guide covers the process. It is slow plus it is entirely doable.