Spoke
Google Business Profile
For a business that serves people in a place, the profile often brings in more contact than the website does. It's also the thing most likely to have been set up once and never looked at again.
Google documents relevance, distance and prominence as the basis for local results. Which profile fields matter most is practitioner judgment, not something Google ranks for you.
For a business that serves people in a place, the profile often brings in more contact than the website does.
People call from it. They get directions from it. They read the reviews on it and decide, frequently without ever visiting your site.
It's also the asset most likely to be half-finished, because somebody set it up once and nobody has looked at it since.
What matters most on a Google Business Profile?
The primary category, then completeness, then reviews. The primary category is your strongest statement of what the business actually is and which searches you're eligible for. Completeness fills in what a searcher needs to act. Reviews supply both the prominence signal and the proof.
Everything else — posts, photos, attributes, Q&A — helps. None of it makes up for the wrong primary category.
Categories
Pick the primary category that describes what the business actually is, as precisely as the list lets you. Add secondary categories for services you genuinely offer.
Two common mistakes. Picking something broader hoping to be eligible for more searches, which usually just means competing with less relevance against better-matched businesses. And adding every plausible secondary category, which dilutes you rather than expanding you.
Go look at what the competitors beating you have chosen. It's public, and it's often the entire explanation.
Completeness
Every blank field is information a prospect either doesn't get or goes and finds somewhere less reliable.
Hours, holiday hours included. Service areas. The attributes that matter in your category — accessibility, languages, whether you need an appointment. Photos, which are what people actually look at. Services with real descriptions. Opening date. A description written for a human being rather than stuffed with search terms.
Then keep it current. A profile still showing last year's holiday hours is actively misinforming people who want to give you money.
Reviews
Reviews do two jobs here. They feed prominence for ranking, and they're the single most-read thing on the profile.
Pace beats total. A steady flow of recent reviews reads like a working business. Thirty reviews from one week two years ago reads like a campaign, and probably was one.
The compliance side isn't optional and Google reviews covers it properly. Short version: ask everyone on the same schedule, never tie an incentive to what somebody says, and never have staff write customer reviews.
Posts, Q&A and the rest
Posts are cheap and don't last long. Worth doing if you've got something real to say. Not worth a content calendar of filler.
The Q&A section is more interesting, because anybody can answer. Seed the genuinely common questions yourself and keep an eye on it. A stranger's wrong answer sitting on your profile is a real problem and it's easy to miss for months.
What you can't control
Distance.
If a searcher is standing closer to a competitor, that competitor has an advantage you cannot buy your way out of, and nothing you do to the profile moves where the searcher is standing.
That matters commercially, because it caps what this channel can produce from one office. It's also the honest answer to "why aren't we first" for a firm sitting on the wrong side of town. The real responses are more offices, or more weight on the places where distance isn't an input at all.
More in Local SEO
SERP anatomy
Ad units, the map pack and organic results stacked on one screen, ranked by different systems on different inputs. Reading the page correctly is the whole prerequisite for working on it.
NAP & citations
Name, address and phone number, identical everywhere. It is clerical work with no creative content, which is exactly why it goes undone and why doing it is an advantage.
Local landing pages
A page per location works when the locations differ. Generated from a template with the city swapped, it is the doorway page pattern, which has been penalized for two decades.
Multi-location
Each office competes in its own market against its own neighbors. Run them off one brand average and you'll never see the two that are quietly failing — which are the two costing you work.