Your Google Business Profile is doing more than your website

For most local businesses, far more people see the Google Business Profile than ever reach the website. It appears in the map pack, down the right hand side of a branded search, and inside Maps itself. For a large share of local searches it is the first thing anybody sees and frequently the only thing.

It is also free, and most of them are half finished.

What people actually do with it

Watch somebody look for a local business on a phone. They search, they glance at the map results, and then they do four things in roughly this order.

They check whether you are open. They look at the photos. They read two or three reviews, usually the most recent and the worst. They tap the call button.

Notice that none of that involves your website. The journey went from search to phone call without the site being opened once, and that is not an edge case. For whole categories, particularly urgent ones like locksmiths, plumbers and emergency dental, it is the normal path.

This has an uncomfortable implication. If your profile is thin and your website is beautiful, you have spent money in the wrong order.

What to fix, roughly in order of what it costs you

Hours, including holidays. Wrong hours lose the call outright and there is no recovering it. Somebody who drives to a closed business does not try again next week, they call the next result. Set the special hours for holidays in advance, because the default is to show your normal hours and let people find out the hard way.

Your primary category. This does more work than anything else on the profile and most businesses pick it once, carelessly, and never revisit it. Be specific. “Roofing contractor” rather than “contractor”. “Pediatric dentist” rather than “dentist” if that is what you are. The category shapes which searches you are eligible to appear for, and the secondary categories matter much less than people assume.

Photos, and recent ones. Profiles with current photos get more engagement, and the bar here is lower than you think. Your own work, taken on a phone, in reasonable light, beats anything from a stock library. People are checking whether you are real. A gallery of generic images achieves the opposite of the intended effect.

The services list. Most businesses leave this empty. It is free text describing what you actually do, it takes about ten minutes, and it gives Google something to match against. There is no reason to skip it other than not knowing it exists.

Reviews, and replying to them. Reviews decide more calls than your advertising does. Replying matters more than people expect, not because of any ranking effect, but because every future reader sees that the business is attended to. A measured reply to a bad review does more good than the review did harm. An unanswered one does the opposite.

Messaging, but only if you will answer it. Turning it on and ignoring it is considerably worse than leaving it off. An unanswered message is a customer who has already decided about you.

What not to pay anybody for

There is a whole industry selling Google Business Profile optimization, and most of what it does is the list above, once.

If somebody wants a monthly retainer to maintain a profile, ask precisely what they will do in month two. The honest answer is usually photos and review replies, which is real work but should be priced like real work rather than like a marketing service.

Be especially careful with anyone promising to get you into the map pack. Proximity to the person searching is a substantial factor in local results, and nobody can change where your business is. An agency guaranteeing map pack placement is either going to sell you a location you do not have or quietly fail.

The same applies to anyone offering to get reviews for you. Incentivized or purchased reviews breach the platform rules, and the downside of being caught is considerably worse than the upside of a slightly higher average.

Where the website does earn its place

None of this is an argument against having a site. It is an argument about order.

When somebody is choosing between three roofers rather than calling the first one, the website is where that decision happens. It is the thing that makes you look like a business with employees and insurance rather than a listing. It is where the proof lives, the work you have done, the questions you answer, the reasons to pick you.

It also does jobs the profile cannot. It is yours, it does not disappear when a platform changes its rules, and it is where paid traffic should land rather than being sent to a profile you do not control.

So the sequence is: get the free thing complete, then build the paid thing properly, then decide whether to drive traffic to it.

The honest limitation

A complete profile does not make the phone ring on its own. What it does is remove reasons to skip you, which is a smaller and more defensive job than it sounds like.

If nobody is searching for your category in your area, a perfect profile changes nothing. If ten people a day are searching and you are being passed over because your hours are wrong and your last photo is from 2021, the profile is costing you money every week.

Work out which of those you are before deciding how much effort it deserves. For most local businesses it is the second one, and the fix is free, which makes it the best return available anywhere in your marketing.