Tips
How to optimise a Google Business Profile for local ranking
Keep your Google Business Profile accurate and useful. Start with the category and business details, then check the information customers need before visiting.
Correction, 23 September 2026: this article no longer assigns unsupported weights to profile settings. It also removes the requirement for character-for-character address matching.
A complete Business Profile helps Google understand your business and gives customers useful information. Google’s local ranking guide describes relevance, distance and prominence. The steps below are our suggested order for checking a profile.
Fill every field, starting with the category
Choose the most specific available primary category that accurately describes the business. Check Google’s category guidance before adding categories.
Add categories for other parts of the business you actually operate. 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
Keep the address accurate on your profile, website and directory listings. Check for old premises and missing unit numbers. Consistent formatting helps people verify the location.
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 you offer, each with a short description a customer can understand. Check it when your services change.
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.