How do you set up a Google Business Profile properly?

The map results sit above the ordinary search results. They are filled in by hand rather than earned over months, and they cost nothing. For anybody selling in a city, this is the highest return on an hour available anywhere in marketing.

What actually decides whether you appear?

Distance

Where the searcher is. Not controllable.

Relevance

Category and services. Controllable.

Prominence

Reviews, mentions, activity. Earned.

You cannot change where somebody is standing. You can change everything else, and most businesses leave both of the controllable ones half-finished.

What should you fill in?

1. The primary category, chosen precisely. "Cleaning service" and "House cleaning service" are different categories and match different searches — pick the one that matches what you actually do most.
2. Every service you offer, listed individually, with a price or a from-price where you can give one.
3. Hours, including holidays. Being shown as closed when you are open is the most expensive mistake on the profile.
4. Service areas if you travel to customers, listed by neighbourhood rather than as a radius.
5. At least ten photographs of real work, real staff and the real premises. Not stock photography — it is obvious and it reads as a business with nothing to show.
6. The description, written for a person rather than stuffed with search terms.

How do you get reviews without being annoying?

Ask every satisfied customer, once, at the moment the job is finished and they are pleased with you. Not a week later by email. Send the direct review link so it takes one tap — the profile gives you one.

Reply to every review, including the bad ones, briefly and without arguing. A calm reply to a harsh review persuades more future customers than the five-star reviews above it do, because it is the one thing on the page that is obviously not managed.

Steady beats spiky. Two reviews a month for a year beats twenty-four in one week, which looks bought and may be treated as such.

How does the profile connect to your website?

They corroborate each other. The name, address and phone number on your site should match the profile exactly, and the same facts should appear in your site’s structured data. That agreement is what makes both easy to trust.

Point the profile link at the most relevant page rather than always the home page — for a specific service, link the page about that service. And keep the hours in both places in step, which is one of the few genuine advantages of having somebody responsible for the site.

What goes wrong most often?

• Never finishing verification, so the profile exists but does not show.
• A category chosen quickly on day one and never revisited.
• Hours that were right in the first year.
• Photographs uploaded once, three years ago.
• A second, duplicate profile created by accident, splitting the reviews between them.

Questions people actually ask

Is Google Business Profile free?

Yes, entirely. Anybody charging you a subscription to "maintain your Google listing" is charging for work you can do yourself in an hour, or should be doing much more than that for the money.

Do I need a shop or office to have a profile?

No. If you travel to customers you set it up as a service-area business and hide the address. Cleaners, contractors and tradespeople should almost all be listed this way.

How many photos should a Google Business Profile have?

At least ten to start, then a few new ones every month. Recency counts, and profiles that are added to regularly do better than profiles that were filled in once and abandoned.

Does the profile replace having a website?

No — it needs one to point at, and the site is where somebody decides whether to trust you after the profile has got their attention. The profile gets you found; the site gets you chosen.