How to Optimize Your Google Business Profile

Your Google Business Profile is the panel that appears in Maps and local results when someone searches for your business, or for what you do nearby. Most advice on how to optimize Google Business Profile listings comes down to making yours complete, accurate and active, inside Google's rules. There is no trick to buy. Google's help page says plainly: "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google."

Our local SEO basics post explains where the profile fits in the bigger picture. This one is the field-by-field work.

How Google decides who shows up

Google's help page names three factors for local results:

• Relevance: how well a profile matches what someone searched for.
• Distance: how far each business is from the customer who is searching.
• Prominence: how well known the business is, which Google says is also based on information such as how many websites link to the business and how many reviews it has.

You can't change distance. The optimization work is relevance (what your profile says you are and do) and prominence (reviews, activity and your reputation across the web).

Get the basics exactly right

Start with Google's guidelines for representing your business, because breaking them can cost you the profile.

Business name. The guidelines say your name should reflect your real-world name, "as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers." Extras such as taglines, store codes, hours or phone numbers are not allowed in the name, and neither is padding like "Smith CPA, Best Tax Accountant Dallas" when the sign on the door says "Smith CPA." If you want a keyword in the name, it has to be part of your real name.

Address or service area. Use your actual location. P.O. boxes and remote mailboxes are not acceptable, and a rented mailing address you don't operate from, which the guidelines call a virtual office, is not eligible for a profile. If you serve customers at their location and don't receive them at yours, as most home care agencies and many contractors do, the guidelines say you should hide the address and show a service area.

Phone and website. The guidelines ask for a phone number that connects to your individual location and is under the business's direct control, ideally a local number in place of a central helpline. A multi-location business should link each profile to that location's own page.

Hours. Keep regular hours accurate and set special hours for holidays. Wrong hours send people to a locked door, which is exactly the kind of experience that ends up in a review.

Choose categories carefully

Categories tell Google what kind of business you are, which is the heart of relevance. Google's guidelines say to use as few categories as possible and to pick ones that complete the sentence "This business IS a," rather than "this business HAS a."

How to choose:

1. Search your main service in your area and note the categories of the businesses in the top results.
2. Pick the most specific category that describes the core of your business as the primary one. A tax practice might choose a tax preparation category or an accounting category, depending on where most of its work comes from.
3. Add secondary categories only for things you genuinely are. Services you sometimes offer belong in the services list.

Write the description and services

The description allows up to 750 characters, with no URLs or HTML. Google suggests covering what you offer, what makes you special, how long you have been in business and anything else helpful, and leaving out promotions, prices and sales.

A pattern that works:

• First sentence: what you are and who you serve, in plain words.
• Second: the area you cover.
• Then two or three specifics a customer would care about, such as languages spoken, weekend availability, or the types of clients you specialize in.
• Last: how to get started.

Here is a hypothetical description for an invented home care agency, at about 400 characters, well inside the limit:

"Example Home Care is a non-medical home care agency for older adults in Plano, Frisco and McKinney. Our caregivers help with bathing, meals, medication reminders and rides to appointments, for a few hours a week or around the clock. Every client has a primary caregiver and a named backup. Family owned since 2012. Call us to arrange a free in-home assessment."

Then fill in the services list with the names customers actually use. "Personal care," "respite care" and "companion care" for a home care agency; "small business tax returns" and "payroll" for a CPA firm; "catering" and "private events" for a restaurant.

Photos, attributes and products

Google's tips page recommends adding photos and videos, and setting the attributes that apply to you. In practice:

• Photos people look for: the outside of the building, so they can find it; the inside; the team; and the work itself. For a restaurant, the food and the menu. For a service-area business, the team and the vehicles.
• Real, recent images. Stock photos tell a customer nothing about you.
• Attributes: fill in every one that genuinely applies, such as accessibility features or amenities.
• Products, if you sell physical goods. Google mentions showing in-stock products for retail stores.

Reviews and replies

Prominence draws on reviews, and Google's tips page recommends responding to them. Google's help page on getting reviews suggests sharing a review link or QR code with customers, and it says offering incentives such as free or discounted goods or services in exchange for reviews is strictly prohibited. That includes incentives to change or remove a negative review. So ask every customer the same way, and reply to every review, including the critical ones. The details are in our post on how to get more Google reviews.

A monthly checklist to keep your Google Business Profile optimized

Profiles drift. Fifteen minutes a month keeps yours current:

• Check that the name, hours, phone and website are still right, and that no edits have been suggested that you didn't make.
• Set special hours for upcoming holidays.
• Add a few new photos.
• Reply to every new review.
• Update services and products when you add or drop one.
• Note anything customers asked or complained about in reviews this month that the profile could answer up front.

Common mistakes

• Keyword stuffing the business name.
• Choosing a broad primary category because it sounds bigger.
• Showing a home address publicly when you serve customers at theirs.
• Picking secondary categories for services you rarely provide.
• Letting a former agency or employee hold the only owner access. Make sure the business itself owns the profile.
• Filling everything in once and never looking at it again.

How Pinn.Media helps

We set up and audit Google Business Profiles as part of local search work, and we tie the profile to a website that backs up what it says. If you want a second pair of eyes on yours, book a discovery call and we will go through it field by field.