What to ask your agency about a Google Business Profile

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on a Google Business Profile, these questions are worth asking early.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

For many local businesses it outperforms the website itself. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Answering reviews publicly signals an active business. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

The short version

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. 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
• Answering reviews publicly signals an active business — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.