For anything a customer wants nearby, the map results sit at the top of the page, above every website underneath them. Being in there's free, it takes an afternoon, and a surprising number of working businesses still aren't.
Here's the whole process, and the three or four places people get it wrong.
What the profile is
A Google Business Profile is the free listing that puts you on Maps and produces the panel that appears beside search results when someone looks you up by name. It's separate from your website. You can have one without the other, and for a business that sells to people nearby, the listing often brings in more calls than the site does.
It's also the piece most within your control. Ranking a website takes months. A profile filled in properly can start showing up in days.
Claiming it, step by step
- Search your business name on Google first. If a listing already exists, someone may have created it automatically or a previous owner set it up. Claiming an existing listing is quicker than making a duplicate, and duplicates hurt you.
- Go to google.com/business and sign in with the Google account you want to own this permanently. Use a business account you'll still control in five years.
- Enter the exact business name. The real one, with no extra words in it.
- Choose your primary category carefully. This is the biggest lever on the whole profile.
- Set your address or your service area. This is the decision covered next, and it matters.
- Add the phone number and website URL.
- Verify. Google decides the method and video verification is now the most common: a short unedited clip showing your signage, your work area, and your tools or stock. Postcard and phone verification still appear for some categories.
Verification takes anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of weeks. If a video is rejected, the usual reasons are that it doesn't clearly show the location, or that it doesn't tie you to the business. Reshoot it showing the sign, the door, the equipment, and yourself unlocking something.
Storefront or service area, and why trades get this wrong
Google offers two shapes of listing and picking the wrong one costs you.
A storefront has an address customers can visit. Shops, restaurants, clinics, salons. The address is public and Google ranks you partly on distance from the searcher.
A service area business goes to the customer. Plumbers, electricians, landscapers, mobile groomers. You set the towns or the radius you cover, and you can hide your address entirely, which matters when you run the business from home.
The mistake is listing a home address publicly on a service area business, or inventing an address in a town you want to rank in. The second one is against Google's guidelines and gets listings suspended, which is a much worse outcome than not ranking there yet.
Set your service area to the places you work. Adding forty towns doesn't make you rank in forty towns; it dilutes the profile.
Fill it in properly, because most people stop halfway
- Categories. One primary, then secondary categories for the other things you do. The primary carries the most weight, so make it what you most want calls about.
- Services. List them individually with a sentence each. This is free text that Google reads.
- Hours. Including holiday hours. Wrong hours generate one-star reviews from people who drove over.
- Photos. Real ones, of your work, your premises, your team, your vehicles. Profiles with photos get meaningfully more engagement, and stock imagery is obvious. This is one place photography pays for itself.
- Description. 750 characters describing what you do and where. Write it for a person.
- Products or menu, if either applies.
- Messaging and booking, if you'll actually respond. Slow replies are worse than the button being off.
- The Q&A section. Anyone can post a question and anyone can answer it, which means a competitor or a confused stranger can answer for you. Seed it with the questions you get asked and answer them yourself.
What determines where you rank
Google names three factors, and only two of them are yours to move.
- Relevance. How well your profile matches what was typed. Categories, services, and description drive this, and you control all of it.
- Distance. How far you're from the searcher, or from the place they named. You cannot change this, which is why an accurate service area does more for you than a large one.
- Prominence. How well known the business is. Reviews, mentions across the web, consistent name and address and phone everywhere you appear, and a real website behind the listing.
Prominence is where a website earns its keep for local search. Matching details on a site that carries pages about the same services give Google something to check the listing against, and a business it can corroborate outranks one it can't.
The mistakes that cost you
- Stuffing keywords into the business name. “Dave’s Plumbing Toronto Emergency 24/7” is against the guidelines, it's reportable by any competitor, and it gets listings suspended.
- A fake or borrowed address. Same outcome, faster.
- Wrong primary category. A landscaper listed under “gardener” competes for a different search entirely, and nothing about the profile looks wrong.
- Letting it go stale. Old hours, a disconnected number, photos from 2019.
- Ignoring reviews. Covered in how to get more Google reviews, which is the other half of this job.