Google Business Profile

For a lot of local businesses, your Google Business Profile matters more than your website does. It sits at the top of the search results, above the regular listings, showing your hours, your photos, your reviews and a map pin before anyone has to click through to a website. Someone deciding between three plumbers rarely reads all three websites first. They look at the map results and pick one, often based on nothing but what is sitting right there in the profile.

That makes the profile worth treating as its own project, not an afterthought you fill in once and forget. It is a specific asset with specific fields, and in my experience, it is rare to find one where all of them are filled in correctly.

What a complete profile looks like

A complete profile has an accurate primary category and any relevant secondary categories — this is one of the most common gaps I find, businesses sitting under a vague or outdated category that does not match what they actually do. It lists real services, not just a category name. It has current hours, including holiday hours kept up to date, because a profile showing "open" when you are closed costs you the visit and the trust.

It has photos — of the business, the team, the work — kept current rather than whatever was uploaded once years ago. It uses posts, which are a simple, underused way to show the profile is actively managed — if you are already sending me material for social media, the same photos and updates usually work here too. It has a filled-out business description that says plainly what you do and where, instead of being left blank. And it has answers in the Q&A section, ideally seeded by the business itself, because an unanswered public question sitting there for months does not help anyone.

Most of these fields cost nothing but a few minutes of attention — which is exactly why they tend to get skipped. Nothing forces you back to them once the profile is live.

Reviews

Reviews matter for two different reasons: they influence whether someone calls you, and, in my experience, they influence how the profile performs in the map pack too. A profile that keeps picking up a steady trickle of recent reviews behaves differently than one sitting on a pile from three years ago with nothing new — I cannot tell you Google's exact mechanism, but the pattern holds often enough across the profiles I manage that I plan around it.

Asking does not have to be awkward. The approach I recommend: ask at the moment someone is already happy — right after a job is finished, right after a good interaction — and make it easy, with a direct link rather than instructions to "search us on Google." What does not work, and what actively backfires, is offering anything in exchange for a review or funneling only positive customers toward leaving one. That is against Google's policies, and profiles that get caught doing it lose more than they gained.

The mistakes that actively hurt

Some things do more than just fail to help — they work against you. An inconsistent name, address or phone number between your profile and your website confuses Google about whether they are even the same business. A business name stuffed with keywords — "Jim's Plumbing Birmingham Emergency 24/7" when the business is legally named "Jim's Plumbing" — violates Google's guidelines and can get a profile suspended. Wrong or overly broad categories put you in front of the wrong searches. And an abandoned profile — no posts, no responses to reviews, stale hours — tells both Google and searchers that nobody is home.

Any one of these is fixable in an afternoon. Left alone, they quietly cost you visibility for months.

What I do, and what stays yours

I audit the profile, fix what is broken or missing, set categories and services correctly, write the description, and put a rhythm in place for photos and posts. If you are on my monthly plan, keeping the profile current is part of the ongoing work rather than a one-time cleanup that decays again in six months.

What I cannot do is write your reviews for you. Google requires reviews to come from real customers, and I will not fake them, buy them, or ask you to. I can make asking easy — templates, direct links, timing — but the asking itself has to come from you or your team.

This works alongside local SEO, which covers your website and your presence across the rest of the web. The profile is the specific asset that drives the map pack; local SEO is everything around it. I usually recommend doing both, since each one reinforces the other.

For more detail, I have written a full guide to optimizing your Google Business Profile and a getting-started guide for Birmingham entrepreneurs.

Start with a free audit

Send me a link to your current profile and I will tell you honestly what is missing and what is actually hurting you — free, before you commit to anything.

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