How to get a Google Business Profile right
This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. The short answer to a Google Business Profile is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
Why it matters
For many local businesses it outperforms the website itself. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- Photos and hours need keeping current
- Answering reviews publicly signals an active business
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
Answering reviews publicly signals an active business. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
Turning this into a decision
What this looks like day to day
Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. 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
The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.