Local SEO
Google Business Profile management
Your Google Business Profile is the first thing local customers see. We set it up correctly, optimise every field, keep it active with posts, and manage reviews and Q&A so it earns the Map Pack.
Who it is for: Local businesses whose profile is incomplete, inactive or invisible in the Map Pack.
Everything in this service
- Profile setup, claim and verification
- Category, service, attribute and photo optimisation
- A content calendar of Google Posts, planned and scheduled
- Review generation, monitoring and responses
- Q&A seeding and management
- Monthly local ranking and action reporting
What to expect
- A complete, active profile Google can trust
- Better visibility for near-me and Map Pack searches
- More calls, bookings and direction requests
How google business profile actually works
Categories are the most powerful field on the profile
The primary category decides which searches your profile is even considered for. Get it wrong and no amount of posting, photos or reviews will rescue the listing, because you are competing in the wrong set. Get it right and everything else starts working.
The way to choose is to look at what the businesses ranking well for your target searches have selected, rather than picking the category that best describes how you think of yourself. Those are often different. A business that considers itself a design studio may find that every top result for its target search is categorised as a marketing agency. The category list is also Google vocabulary rather than industry vocabulary, so the closest match is sometimes a term nobody in your trade would use.
Secondary categories broaden reach but dilute if overused. A handful that genuinely describe services you provide is sensible. Ten added speculatively confuses the profile. We test primary category changes deliberately, one at a time, with enough time between changes to see the effect, because this is the field where a change moves rankings fastest in both directions.
- Primary category chosen from what actually ranks, not from self-description
- Secondary categories limited to services you genuinely deliver
- Category changes made one at a time, with time to observe the effect
- Category list reviewed periodically, since Google adds and retires options
The fields most profiles leave blank
Completeness is a ranking and conversion factor, and most profiles are perhaps half complete. The services list is the biggest omission. Each service you add is a labelled item with its own description, and it lets the profile match specific searches rather than only the category term. For a trade with fifteen distinct services, that is fifteen extra matching surfaces sitting unused.
Products behave similarly and are not only for retailers. Service businesses can list packages, and they render as visual cards that take up space in the profile. Attributes fill in the practical facts: accessibility, parking, payment methods, whether appointments are needed, languages spoken, and ownership attributes where they apply. These answer questions that would otherwise cause someone to call a competitor instead.
The business description is read less than people assume but still matters. The first sentence should state what the business does and where, plainly. Opening hours need holiday and seasonal exceptions set in advance, because a profile showing open when you are closed generates a bad review from someone who drove to a locked door.
- Every service listed individually, with its own description
- Products or packages added, since they render as visual cards
- Attributes completed, including accessibility, payment and appointment fields
- Special hours set ahead of holidays rather than after complaints
- Description leading with what you do and where, in plain words
Photos, Posts and the activity signal
Photos are the most viewed part of most profiles. Buyers look at the premises, the team, the work and the products before they read anything. Stock imagery is transparent and it damages trust. Real photographs, added regularly rather than uploaded once at setup, do two jobs: they convert, and they signal an operating business.
Posts work the same way. Their individual reach is modest and the honest framing is that a Post is not a broadcast channel. What it does is keep the profile current, occupy space in the listing, and give returning viewers something recent to see. A steady rhythm of genuine updates, offers and answers beats a burst of five and then six months of silence.
Q and A is the neglected one. Anyone can ask a question on your profile, and anyone can answer, which means a competitor or a confused member of the public can be the voice representing your business. Asking your own common questions and answering them properly is permitted and sensible, provided the questions are real ones customers ask and the answers are honest.
- Real photographs added on a regular rhythm, never stock imagery
- Posts used for currency and presence, with realistic expectations of reach
- Common questions published and answered in Q and A, before someone else does
- Wrong or misleading public answers reported and corrected promptly
Reviews and how we handle them
Review volume, rating, recency and content all influence local visibility, and the content part is underrated. Reviews that mention a specific service and a specific place give the profile relevance signals that a bare five stars does not.
The legitimate way to get them is to ask every customer, at the right moment, with a link that takes one tap. Consistency is what builds volume, not clever tactics. What we never do is gate reviews by screening for happy customers first, offer anything in exchange, or buy them. Review gating and incentivised reviews breach Google policy and breach the FTC rule on consumer reviews and testimonials. They also get detected, and a filtered profile is worse than a small one.
Responses matter as much as the reviews. Every review gets a reply, because the replies are read by prospects deciding whether to call. Negative reviews get a calm, specific, non-defensive response that addresses the actual issue and offers a route to resolve it. That reply is written for the hundred people who will read it, not for the one person who wrote the complaint.
- Every customer asked, consistently, with a one-tap review link
- No gating, no incentives, no purchased reviews, ever
- All reviews answered, with the reply written for future readers
- Recurring complaints treated as operational problems to fix
The profile is now a fact source for AI answers too
The profile has always been the front door for local search. It has become something else as well: a structured, verified record about your business that AI assistants and answer features draw on when someone asks a local question. When an assistant states your opening hours or says you offer a particular service, the profile is a likely source of that statement.
This raises the cost of leaving fields blank or letting them go stale. An empty services list is no longer just a missed matching opportunity, it is an absence where a system looking for the fact finds nothing and either says nothing or takes a worse source. Wrong hours are no longer just an inconvenience, they are a wrong fact being repeated confidently.
We would not claim that optimising the profile causes AI citation, because nobody can demonstrate that cleanly. What we can say is that the profile is one of the few places where you control a structured, verified record about your business, and that keeping it complete and accurate is a low-cost way to make sure the systems reading it are reading something correct.
- Structured facts kept complete, because absences get filled from worse sources
- Hours, services and contact details treated as published statements
- Consistency with the website and directories, so nothing contradicts
- No claims made about causing AI citation, only about controlling the record
How we run it and what gets reported
Setup or rescue comes first: verification, category testing, filling every field, and clearing out whatever the previous setup left wrong. Duplicate listings get found and merged at this stage, because duplicates split your signals and are surprisingly common on businesses that have moved or rebranded.
Then it runs weekly. Posts scheduled, photos added, new reviews answered within a day or two, Q and A monitored, and any suggested edits from the public checked, since anyone can propose a change to your hours or address and some of those get applied automatically.
Reporting uses profile performance data for calls, direction requests, website clicks and messages, split by whether people found you through a direct branded search or a discovery search, since discovery is the number that shows the optimisation working. Alongside that we run local rank checks from several points across your service area, because a single check from one location tells you almost nothing about where you actually appear.
- Verification, category testing and full field completion at the start
- Duplicate listings found and merged before anything else
- Weekly rhythm: posts, photos, review responses, Q and A, suggested edits
- Calls, directions, clicks and messages reported, split by discovery versus direct
- Rank checked from multiple points across the service area, not one
A clear path, step by step
- 01
Audit and plan
We check the current state, find what is holding you back, and agree a prioritised plan.
- 02
Fix and build
We make the changes: technical fixes, content, structure and internal links.
- 03
Make it citable
We add the structure and signals that help search and AI engines trust and quote the page.
- 04
Track and improve
We measure rankings, visibility and enquiries each month, then refine.
Why choose us for this
We manage the profile weekly, not set-and-forget
Honest review generation from real customers only
Every field optimised, including the ones most setups skip
Common questions
Why does my Google Business Profile matter?
For local searches it often ranks above your website. A complete, active profile with genuine reviews is the single strongest local visibility asset most businesses have.
How often should the profile be updated?
Weekly is a good rhythm: posts, new photos, fresh Q&A and review responses. Activity signals a real, open business to both Google and customers.
Explore related work
Want this for your business?
Book a free visibility call and I will tell you honestly whether I can help.
How this is delivered
One person leads every project. Where a job genuinely needs a specialist, I bring in people I have worked with before and manage them, so you get one point of contact and one invoice rather than three suppliers blaming each other.
- You talk to the person responsible for the work, not an account manager
- Specialists are briefed and managed by me, and their work is checked before it reaches you
- One contract, one invoice, one place to chase