A Google Business Profile: the questions we get asked most

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. The questions about a Google Business Profile that come up most often on our calls.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Do we need to care about this?

For many local businesses it outperforms the website itself. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here.

How do we know it is working?

Answering reviews publicly signals an active business. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

The short version

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Three things worth confirming about a Google Business Profile before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Photos and hours need keeping current — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.