Google Business Profile Optimisation: The Complete Checklist

Your primary category and your review count decide most of your local ranking. Everything else on your Google Business Profile matters, but those two are not close to the rest, and most businesses get the first one wrong and neglect the second entirely.

Completing this profile properly is free, takes about an hour, and for a local business it reliably outperforms the first several months of a paid SEO retainer. Here is everything, in order of what it is actually worth.

The two that matter most

1. Primary category. You get one, and it is the strongest single signal on the profile. Choose the most specific one that genuinely describes your main business — "Emergency Plumber" behaves differently from "Plumber", which behaves differently from "Plumbing Supply Store". Search for what you do, look at the businesses currently ranking in the map pack, and see what categories they use. That is not cheating; it is reading the market.

Get this right rather than nearly right. Changing it later resets some of the trust you have built.

2. Reviews — count, recency and replies. More reviews rank better. Recent reviews rank better than old ones, so a business with 40 reviews from this year beats one with 120 from four years ago. And replying to reviews is itself a signal.

Ask every satisfied customer, within a day or two of finishing, with a direct link that opens the review form in one tap. Systematically, forever. This is the single most neglected lever in local search and it is entirely free.

Never buy reviews. Beyond Google's rules, it is a consumer-protection offence in the US, UK, EU and Australia, detection is better than people assume, and a suspended profile is a genuinely painful thing to recover.

The rest of the profile, properly

3. Secondary categories. Add every one that genuinely applies, up to nine. These widen what you can appear for without diluting your primary.

4. Business name — exactly as it is. Do not stuff keywords in. "Smith Plumbing" is your name; "Smith Plumbing | Emergency Plumber Leeds | 24/7" is a violation, it gets reported by competitors, and it can suspend the profile.

5. Address, or service area — but not both incorrectly. If customers come to you, use the address. If you go to them, set it as a service-area business and hide the address. Never invent an address, never use a virtual office you do not staff, and never use a mailbox. This is the most common cause of suspension.

6. Phone number. A local number if you have one. It must match your website exactly.

7. Hours, including special hours. Set holiday hours in advance. Being shown as open when you are closed produces genuinely angry one-star reviews.

8. Services, each with a description. Add every service as a separate entry with real text. This is underused and it is free surface area.

9. Products, if you have them. Even for service businesses, package offerings work well here.

10. Business description — 750 characters. Say what you do, who for, where, and what makes you different. Write it as plain sentences, not a keyword list. Keep it identical to the description you use elsewhere.

11. Photographs, real ones. Businesses with photos get substantially more contact than those without. Your premises, your team, your work, your vehicles. Add some monthly. Stock imagery is recognisable and it costs you trust.

12. Attributes. Wheelchair accessible, women-owned, free parking, appointment required, languages spoken. Small individually, and they appear as filters in search.

13. Booking or appointment link, if you take bookings.

14. Q&A — seed it yourself. You can ask and answer questions on your own profile. Put the five questions customers actually ask there, answered properly. If you leave it empty, someone else will eventually answer for you, possibly wrongly.

15. Posts. Offers, updates, completed jobs. Monthly is plenty. Modest effect, near-zero cost.

Things that quietly cost you

Inconsistent details. Your name, address and phone must be byte-identical across your website, Google, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Facebook and every directory. "Street" versus "St" genuinely matters, because machines are doing the matching.

A missing or wrong website link. Point it at the most relevant page, not always the homepage. A single-location service business should usually link to the service page that matches the primary category.

Ignoring negative reviews. A calm, specific, non-defensive reply to a bad review does more for you than the review costs. Everyone deciding whether to call you reads it.

Letting the profile go stale. Old hours, closed services, photos from 2019. Google notices activity, and so do customers.

Do this once a quarter

Set a recurring reminder and check: hours still correct including upcoming holidays, new photographs added, all reviews replied to, services still accurate, no unanswered questions in Q&A, and no "suggested edits" from the public that have quietly changed something.

That last one catches people out. Anyone can suggest an edit to your profile, and some get applied automatically.

What to expect

For a business in a smaller town, a properly completed profile plus a steady flow of new reviews usually produces visible movement in the local map pack within four to eight weeks. In a competitive city it takes longer and reviews carry proportionally more of the weight.

None of this requires an agency. It requires an hour now and ten minutes a month afterwards, and it is the part of local SEO with the best return by a wide margin. The rest of the local checklist is here if you want to keep going.

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If you would rather it was done properly once and then handed over, we do that as part of local SEO work.