Google Business Profile Optimisation: A Field-Tested Checklist
Your Business Profile is the highest-leverage page you do not own. Here is how I set one up so it earns rankings instead of just existing.
The profile is a ranking asset, not a directory listing
Most businesses claim their Google Business Profile, add a phone number and a logo, and never touch it again. That is the difference between appearing on a map somewhere and appearing in the three-result pack that captures the clicks.
Google ranks local results on relevance, distance and prominence. You cannot change where your customer is standing, but relevance and prominence are almost entirely under your control — and the profile is where most of that control lives.
Get the primary category right before anything else
Your primary category is the single strongest lever on the profile. It tells Google which set of searches you are eligible for at all, and choosing a broad or slightly-wrong one quietly caps everything you do afterwards.
Look at what the businesses currently ranking in your pack have chosen. If three of them are "Emergency dental service" and you are listed as "Dentist", you are competing in a different race. Add secondary categories for genuine additional services, but do not stuff them — irrelevant categories dilute rather than expand your reach.
Fill in services and products properly
Every service you offer should be listed with its own description. This is free, structured text that tells Google exactly what you do, and most competitors leave it empty. Write each description for a person deciding whether to call — not for a keyword tool.
- Use the service names your customers actually say out loud
- One clear paragraph per service, no keyword repetition
- Mention the areas you serve where it reads naturally
- Add pricing if you are comfortable — profiles with prices convert better
Photos do more than you expect
Aim for at least twenty original photos per location, and add new ones monthly. Exterior shots from the direction people approach from, interior shots, your team, and your actual work. Stock photography is obvious and it undermines trust at the exact moment someone is deciding.
Geotagging images is not a ranking factor, despite what you will read. Recency and quantity of genuine photos do correlate with engagement, and engagement is what the profile is measured on.
NAP consistency: boring, and non-negotiable
Name, address and phone must match character for character everywhere they appear — your website footer, Facebook, Yelp, local directories, industry listings. "Suite 4" in one place and "Ste. 4" in another is a genuine mismatch as far as an automated system is concerned.
Audit what already exists before building anything new. Building fresh citations on top of inconsistent data just scales the problem, and cleaning up afterwards costs more than doing it in order.
Reviews: velocity, recency, and replies
A steady trickle of reviews beats a burst followed by silence. Build the request into your workflow at the moment the customer is happiest — right after the job is done, not in a newsletter three weeks later. Use a short link that goes straight to the review form.
Reply to every review, positive and negative. Replies signal an active profile, and how you handle a complaint publicly is read closely by the next person deciding whether to call you.
Use Posts and Q&A
Posts keep the profile active and occupy space in your listing that competitors leave empty. Weekly is plenty. The Q&A section is more interesting: you are allowed to ask and answer your own questions, so seed it with the things people actually phone up to ask.
What to measure
Profile views are close to meaningless on their own. Track calls, direction requests, website clicks and message volume, and check your position across a grid of points around your location rather than from your own desk — where you are standing changes what you see.
The order that works
- Fix categories
- Clean up NAP everywhere
- Complete services, products and attributes
- Add twenty photos, then keep adding
- Turn reviews into a repeatable process
- Post weekly and seed the Q&A
- Track calls and grid rankings monthly
None of this is complicated. It is just rarely done completely — which is exactly why doing it completely works.
