How to optimise a Google Business Profile for local ranking

For a local search, the Business Profile decides more of your ranking than the website does. If you only have a day, spend it there.

Fill every field, starting with the category

The primary category is the strongest single setting in the profile. It decides which searches you are eligible for at all. Search the term you want to appear for and look at which businesses show, then check what they have chosen. The category list is long and specific, and picking the broad one costs you the specific searches.

Add secondary categories for the other things you genuinely do. They carry less weight, and listing services you do not offer produces enquiries you cannot serve.

Get the name exactly right

The name field should be your business name. Adding keywords to it is against Google’s guidelines, competitors report it, and the edit gets reverted in a way that can suspend the profile.

If your legal name genuinely contains the service word, that is fine. Inventing one is not.

Address, hours and service area

The address has to match your site and your directory listings character for character. Pick one format and use it everywhere.

Set the hours, and set special hours for every holiday before it arrives. A profile that says open when the door is locked generates exactly the review you would expect.

If you travel to customers and have no walk-in premises, use a service area and hide the address. A hidden address is a supported configuration, and a fake storefront is not.

Photographs

Add real photographs of the premises, the team and the work. Interior, exterior, and the thing you actually make or do. Exterior photographs help people find the door, which sounds trivial and is the reason for a share of bad reviews.

Add new ones occasionally. Recency shows.

Services and products

Fill the services list with the things a customer would search for, each with a short description in their words. This section is indexed and it is left empty on a large share of profiles, which makes it cheap to compete on.

Reviews, which are the ongoing work

Volume, average rating and recency all appear in the result. A steady flow beats a burst.

Ask at the moment the customer is happiest, which is usually right after the work, in person. Send a direct link.

Reply to all of them. A reply to a bad review is written for the next reader, not for the reviewer. Acknowledge, state what happened, say what you changed, stop. Arguing in public has never once worked.

Never buy reviews. They get filtered, they are reported by competitors and the penalty lands on the profile you depend on.

The Q and A section

Anyone can ask, and anyone can answer, including people who do not work for you. Seed it with the real questions you get on the phone, answer them yourself, and check it monthly for answers someone else added.

Watch for edits you did not make

Suggested edits to hours, category, address and even permanent closure get accepted without your approval. Check the profile monthly. A competitor marking you permanently closed is a known tactic and it is invisible until someone tells you.

Then connect it to the site

Link the profile to the exact page for that location. Put the same address in the footer as text. Mark it up with LocalBusiness structured data.

The profile and the site corroborate each other, and the corroboration is the point. That is also why our SEO work treats directory consistency as a technical task with a checklist, instead of as marketing.