Your Google Listing Is More Than an Address
When somebody searches for something like plumber Byron Bay, or hotel near me, Google can show a map and a handful of local businesses above the ordinary website results. Your profile is a large part of that.
It tells a person what you do, where you are, when you're open, what the place looks like, what other customers thought and how to get hold of you. It also gives Google information to use when it works out which businesses are relevant to the search.
What I Check and Improve
Optimising a profile is not finding a keyword and putting it in every available field. I look at the whole listing and at how it fits with everything else about you online.
- Business category: your primary category is one of the clearest ways to tell Google what kind of business you are, so I check it and the secondaries against what you actually do
- Services: the services on the profile matching what you really provide, checked against the website and against the searches that matter
- Business information: name, address, phone number, opening hours, website and service area, accurate and consistent wherever they appear
- Business description: what the business does and who it helps, written to read like a business description rather than something assembled for a search engine
- Photos: current, useful pictures, because a profile leaning on five year old shots and a blurry logo tells a customer something you did not intend
- Reviews: a sensible process for asking real customers and answering them, set up so it runs without you having to remember
- The rest of the profile: products, attributes and the other features, used where they genuinely apply and left alone where they don't
The important bit
A Good Profile Isn't Enough on Its Own
You can have five stars, two hundred reviews and every field filled in, and still not come first for every local search.
Google says local results are primarily based on relevance, distance and prominence, so there is no setting that guarantees first position in Maps. Only one of those three is about the listing at all.
If the profile says one thing, the website says another and an old directory listing carries a phone number you stopped using years ago, that is confusion you don't need. Where the problem goes beyond the listing itself, my local SEO service covers the website and the wider local search presence as well.
A straight answer
What Happens When I Take a Look
I look at your profile
What's missing, what's wrong, and what has gone out of date since somebody last touched it.
I compare your profile with the businesses above you
Which profiles are appearing, on which searches, and whether any of what they are doing is actually worth copying.
I fix the things that matter
Categories, services, business information, photos and the other useful parts of the profile, in priority order.
I connect the profile to your website
The profile and the site should describe the same business and the same services, because anything reading both will notice when they don't.
We measure what changes
Where this is part of ongoing local SEO, I track the searches and the local visibility that matter to you.
Reviews, and What I Won't Do to Get Them
Reviews are useful to customers first. Google also says review count and positive ratings can contribute to prominence, but that is not a reason to chase a target number or to manufacture any of them.
The approach that works
- Do good work
- Ask customers at the right moment
- Make it easy for them to leave a review
- Respond to what they write
Things I won't do
- Manufacture reviews
- Buy reviews
- Tell you to offer something for five stars
- Chase a magic number of reviews
If You Work From Home
Not every business has a shopfront. Consultants, mobile services and most trades businesses work from an address customers never visit, and a service area profile is set up differently as a result.
I'll set the profile up around the way the business actually operates. I'm not going to recommend dressing a home office up as customer-facing premises, and if I'm not sure you qualify for a particular setup I'll say so rather than look for a way around the rules.
Terminology
Google Maps SEO, Profile SEO and Local SEO
You'll see this service called several things. They are closely related without being identical, and the difference is mostly one of scope.
| Google Business Profile optimisation | the profile itself: categories, services, business information, photos and reviews |
|---|---|
| Google Maps SEO, Google Maps optimisation, Google Business Profile SEO | the same work under different names. The vocabulary varies with whoever is selling it |
| Local SEO | the wider job, taking in your website, local pages, your business information elsewhere and the other signals around you. The profile is one piece of that |
Questions
Google Business Profile FAQs
Ring me if the one you want is missing.
How do I get my business higher on Google Maps?
There is no button that moves a business up the map results. Google says local ranking is primarily based on relevance, distance and prominence. I look at all three and work out which of them you can realistically improve.
How long does Google Business Profile optimisation take?
Some of it is done the same day. Whether local rankings move, and how fast, depends on the competition, where you are and how strong the signals around the business are. I record a baseline first so we are measuring something.
Do more Google reviews mean I'll rank higher?
Not automatically. Google says review count and positive ratings can contribute to prominence, but reviews are one part of local ranking. Relevance and distance still apply.
Can you remove a bad review?
Not a genuine one, because we don't like it. If a review breaches Google's policies there are legitimate ways to report it. Otherwise I'd rather help you answer it well and build a stronger set of real reviews around it.
Can you help if I don't have a physical shop?
Yes, depending on what the business does and whether it qualifies for a profile at all. A service area business is set up differently from one customers visit at an address.
Do I need local SEO as well?
Not necessarily. If the profile itself is the problem, that is where I'd start and it may be all you need. If you want to rank for a spread of local service searches, the website and the wider local work come into it too.