Six things people get wrong on their Google Business Profile

Search for what you sell and put your town after it. Above the ordinary results sits a map with three businesses in it.

If you are not one of those three, most of the people searching will not reach your website, however good it is. They tap one of the three, ring the number, and their afternoon is sorted.

Getting into that map is a different job from ranking a website, and the work happens almost entirely on a free listing that most businesses fill in once and forget.

1. The primary category is not the one customers search for

Your profile has one primary category and up to nine others. The primary one does most of the work, and the rest do far less than people assume.

A plumber whose primary category reads “Bathroom remodeler” is competing at a disadvantage for “plumber near me”, because the category is where Google starts. Secondary categories will not rescue it.

Go and look at yours. Then search the term you want to be found for, click on the two or three businesses sitting above you, and see what they have picked. Their categories are public. If they have all chosen something you have not, that is your answer, and changing it costs nothing.

One caution: pick the category that describes what you are, not the one you wish you were. A listing in a category the business does not fit gets reported by competitors, and a suspended profile takes weeks to get back.

2. The service areas are doing something you did not intend

This one is invisible, and it catches out any business without a shop front.

If customers do not come to you, Google hides your address and marks the listing as a service-area business. It still needs a point on the map to measure distance from, so it works one out from the areas you listed. Distance from that point to the searcher is one of the strongest factors deciding who makes the three.

Which means the areas you tick are not a wish list. Adding a large city forty minutes away pulls that calculated centre towards it, and away from the town where your customers are.

You can see roughly where yours has landed. Open your listing in Google Maps on a computer and look at the address bar. After the business name there is an @ followed by two long numbers, then further along a !3d and a !4d with two more. Those are latitude and longitude. Paste the pair into the search box and Google will show you the spot. On plenty of service-area listings it is nowhere near where the owner sits.

Google does not publish how it works this out, so treat what you find as a signal rather than a verdict. It is still worth knowing, because the fix is free and the trade-off is a real business decision: covering a big city on paper may be costing you the town on your doorstep.

3. The opening hours are last year’s

Hours are the field nobody revisits, and they cost more than they look.

Somebody searching at ten past five on a Thursday sees “Closed” and taps the next business. If your listing says you shut at five and you are there until half past, you have handed away every late enquiry for however long that has been wrong.

The reverse is worse. Somebody drives over on a Saturday because the listing says open, finds the door locked, and leaves a one-star review that sits under your name for years.

Bank holidays are worth ten minutes of your time. Google prompts for special hours and most businesses ignore the prompt, so the listing claims normal opening on Boxing Day. Set them in advance for the year and the problem goes away.

4. The photos are from whenever the listing was set up

Listings with photos get more calls and more direction requests than listings without. That much is well established. What matters more is that a photo is the only thing on your profile that shows a customer what they are walking into.

A van with your name on it, the shop front as it looks now, the workshop mid-job, the team. Not stock images: people can tell, and a stock photo of a smiling receptionist who does not work for you is worse than no photo.

Take a dozen on a phone, in daylight, and add a few every couple of months rather than fifty in one afternoon and nothing for three years.

5. The reviews sit there unanswered

Reviews are the strongest thing you can influence. Volume, how recent they are, and how often you reply all feed in.

Ask every customer, in person, while they are pleased with you. A card with a short link works better than an email sent three days later. What you cannot do is buy them or offer anything in exchange, which Google detects and punishes properly.

Answer all of them, including the good ones, in a sentence or two. On a bad review, reply once, calmly, with the facts and an offer to sort it out. You are not writing for the person who left it. You are writing for the next customer, who is reading the argument and deciding what you are like to deal with.

An unanswered one-star from eighteen months ago tells that person more than your website does.

6. The website and the listing disagree with each other

Google cross-checks the two. Where they conflict, it trusts you less, and the listing is where that shows up.

The usual culprits are small. The business name has “Ltd” on the listing and not on the site. The phone number on the site is an old mobile. The listing says you shut at five and the contact page says half past. A registered office address in another city sits in the website footer and reads like a second place of business.

Pick the version that is true, put it in both places, and add the listing’s link to your site so the two point at each other. The work we do on local search starts with exactly this, because it is dull, it is free, and it is the thing most often left half done.

What matters less than people tell you

Posts. Google Business Profile lets you publish short updates, and plenty of people will sell you a monthly package of them. They are not a ranking factor. A post can be useful for an actual announcement, a change of hours or an offer that ends on a date, and somebody who has already found your listing might read one. Doing them on a schedule to please an algorithm achieves nothing.

The same goes for the description field. Write it once, in plain English, for a person. It does not feed the map.

Where to start

Categories and service areas first, since those two decide whether you are in the running at all. Hours next, because a wrong one costs you money the same week. Then work on reviews steadily, for as long as you are in business.

Most of this is an afternoon. None of it needs an agency.

If you would rather have somebody check it over, our free website review covers the listing alongside the site: where you come up for local searches now, how your profile compares with the businesses above you, and which of the six above is costing you the most.