What a Google Business Profile actually does

What it is

Your Google Business Profile is the free listing that feeds Google Maps and the local results, the block of nearby businesses with a map sitting above it. It used to be called Google My Business, and plenty of people still call it that.

It is not your website. It is a separate thing you control, and it often gets seen more than your website does, because someone searching for a plumber on their phone frequently calls straight from the map result without clicking through to anyone's site.

What Google says decides who shows up

Google publishes the three things that determine local ranking:

• Relevance. How well your profile matches what somebody searched for.
• Distance. How far you are from the person searching.
• Prominence. How well known your business is, which includes reviews and links to your site.

Google also says plainly that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. Worth remembering the next time someone cold-calls promising a guaranteed spot in the map results.

Distance you can't do anything about. Relevance and prominence you can.

The parts worth your time

• Your primary category. This is the single most important choice on the profile. Pick the one that describes what you mainly do, as specifically as the list allows, then add the others as extra categories.
• Your services. List what you actually sell, in the words your customers use, not industry terms.
• Your service area, if you travel to customers. This is also how you keep a home address private.
• Hours, including holiday hours. Wrong hours cost you calls, and they earn you the kind of review nobody wants.
• Real photos. Your work, your team, your truck. Photos of people do more than a logo. Add new ones now and then.
• The website link. Point it at the page that matches what the profile is about, which is not always your home page.
• Reviews, and your replies. Ask real customers, right after you finish the work. Reply to all of them, especially the bad ones, because everyone else reads that reply.
• Updates. Short posts about an offer or something new. They show up on your profile and they tell Google the listing is looked after.

What it won't do

• It won't fix a bad website. A good profile sends people to your site. If the site is slow, confusing, or unreadable on a phone, you paid for the click and lost the customer.
• It won't move you closer. If you're 20 miles out and your competitor is downtown, distance is working against you for downtown searches.
• It isn't the same as ranking on Google. The map results and the regular blue links are two different systems. You can do well in one and be invisible in the other.

Keeping it healthy

A profile is not something you fill out once. Check it monthly. Confirm your hours and phone number, look for edits the public has suggested, and watch for duplicate listings of your own business, which confuse both Google and your customers.

Two things to avoid: stuffing keywords into your business name, which breaks Google's rules and gets profiles suspended, and buying reviews. Google removes fake reviews, and the profile takes the damage.

What to do this week

1. Read every field

   Log in, go through the whole profile, and fill in anything blank. Most profiles are half empty.

2. Fix your primary category

   If it's vague, make it specific. This is the highest-leverage ten seconds on the whole listing.

3. Ask three customers for a review

   Recent, happy, real. Send them the link. Then reply to each review when it lands.

Where this fits

Your profile and your website back each other up. The profile earns the local visibility, and the site is what convinces someone once they arrive. If you want help with the listing itself, that's Google Business Profile management. If the problem is that your website doesn't show up at all, start with why your website doesn't show up on Google.