A Google Business Profile is the free account Google gives your company, and it decides whether you show up in Google Maps and in the three results with a map that sit at the top of the page on a local search. Categories, service area, hours, services, photos and reviews all live in it. It is free, it is separate from your website, and for most local businesses it brings in more calls than the website does.
Briefly explained
- It costs nothing, and there is no other route into Google Maps or the local results.
- Google ranks it on three things: how well it matches the search, how close you are, and how established you look. Your website is not one of them.
- Filling the profile in and keeping reviews arriving outweighs every other lever available to you.
- Add a city or a service to the business name and you risk losing the profile altogether.
Where does the profile actually appear?
One profile feeds three different places. That is how a company with an average website still gets the calls.
- Google Maps: Someone opens Maps, types what they need, and picks from the names that come back. Your website is never part of that.
- The Local Pack: The three businesses shown above the normal results when Google decides the searcher wants someone nearby. Google fills those three slots from profiles, not from websites.
- The knowledge panel: The block that takes over the side of the page when somebody looks you up by name. Every line in it came from a field you filled in or left empty.
The third one is easy to forget. Even a customer who came from a referral searches your name first, and the profile is what they see.
What belongs in the profile?
Most profiles are half filled in. Each field below does one of two things: it helps a customer choose you, or it tells Google what you are.
- Name: What is on the invoice and the sign. Nothing else.
- Primary category: The most important setting in the profile, because it decides which searches you can appear for at all. You can add secondary categories, and they pick up a few extra searches, but they never outweigh the primary one. Two businesses doing identical work can rank completely differently because one picked the category customers search for and the other picked the nearest match.
- Address or service area: An address where people walk in to see you; a list of towns where you drive out to them. A service area business keeps the street address out of public view and names the places it covers.
- Hours: Holidays included, and honest about whether anyone answers at 2am. Nothing earns a one-star review faster than a locked door at a time your profile promised.
- Photos: Your premises, your team, the work you finished last week. Stock photos tell a customer you have nothing real to show.
- Services: Listed one by one, not summarized. Every service you want to be called about gets its own line.
- Questions and answers: Anyone can ask, and anyone can answer. If you do not answer them, a stranger will.
How does Google choose who to show?
Google names three factors. They work differently, and only two of them are in your control.
- Relevance: How well the profile matches the search. Your categories and services decide this. The description does not.
- Distance: How far you are from the person searching. No budget changes it, which is why you can rank well in Round Rock and not show up at all in South Austin.
- Prominence: How established the business looks online. Reviews, citations — your business details listed on other sites — links, and mentions you never asked for. It is the slowest of the three to build, and the only one that keeps growing as long as you work at it.
What do reviews do for the profile?
Reviews are the one part of the profile a competitor cannot copy. They feed the ranking, and they decide which of two companies a customer calls.
The pattern matters more than the total. Recent reviews, arriving steadily, each one answered in public. Two hundred reviews that stopped eighteen months ago make the business look like it is winding down, whatever the average score says. Review velocity covers how to keep them coming without breaking Google’s rules.
Write the reply for the next customer, not for the reviewer. A calm, specific answer under a bad review wins back more than the review cost you.
What gets a profile suspended?
Suspensions are common, and most of them are self-inflicted.
- Keywords added to the business name
- An address no one works from — a mailbox, a virtual office, a relative’s house
- Two profiles for one location, or one profile per employee
- A service area stretched across half of Texas
- Paying for reviews, or only asking the customers you expect to be happy
Getting a suspended profile back can take weeks, and you compete without one the whole time. Check for these before the email arrives.
What do the terms mean?
- Primary category: The one category that decides which searches you can appear for.
- Service area: The cities you cover when customers do not come to your address.
- Knowledge panel: What that branded search puts beside the results.
- Justification: A line Google pulls from your reviews or services and shows under your name in the local results, such as “Their review mentions same-day service”.
- Google Guarantee: The badge on Local Services Ads. You earn it through license and background checks, not through the profile.
What should you check every month?
Ten minutes a month, on a set day, heads off most of what is on this page.
- Hours, including holidays
- New questions, answered by you before the public answers them
- New reviews, replied to — the good ones too
- Edits Google or the public has made without telling you
- Photos from the last month of work, so the profile does not look abandoned
- Whether the number still rings somewhere a person picks up
Owner questions
