The Google Business Profile work that actually moves calls

A Google Business Profile is the only marketing asset most local businesses own that can generate a phone call without anyone visiting their website. It is also, reliably, the one nobody has logged into for two years.

We audit a lot of these. The pattern barely changes: claimed, partially filled, one set of photos from whenever the last refurbishment happened, a category chosen in a hurry, and a services list that is empty. The profile is not broken. It is just doing about a third of what it could.

Start with the category, because everything hangs off it

Your primary category determines which searches you are eligible for at all. Not "ranks well for" — eligible for. Get this wrong and the rest of the work is spent on the wrong race.

Two rules we apply:

• The primary category should describe what you mostly do, not what is most profitable or most aspirational. A supplements brand that also ships to the UK is still a supplements brand, not an international distributor.
• Secondary categories are useful but they are not free. Each one broadens what Google thinks you are, which can dilute relevance for the main term. Three or four well chosen beats eleven hopeful ones.

A quick way to sanity check: search your main service term in an incognito window from your own area and look at the three businesses in the map. Their primary categories are usually visible on their profiles. If yours is different from all three, you want a good reason.

The services list is the most under-used field on the profile

You can list individual services, each with its own description. Almost nobody fills this in. It is one of the few places you can put your own words, at length, in a field Google reads and often surfaces.

Write these the way a customer would describe the problem, not the way your industry names the product. "Emergency lock replacement" rather than "reactive security provision". If a customer would not say it out loud on the phone, it does not belong here.

Photos: quantity matters less than recency and type

The instinct is to upload forty photos at once and consider it done. A steadier trickle does more, and a mix of types does more again — the exterior so people can find you, the interior so they know what to expect, the team so they know who is arriving, and the work itself.

Two things we see hurt profiles:

• Stock photography. It is usually recognisable, and it makes a profile feel like a franchise page rather than a real business. A phone photo of your actual van outperforms a licensed image of a generic one.
• Photos that are three years old on a business that has since moved or rebranded. A customer who arrives at a shopfront that no longer looks like the photo has already had a small bad experience before meeting you.

Posts, questions and the features worth ignoring

Google keeps adding surfaces to the profile. They are not equally valuable, and treating them as a checklist is how a marketing hour disappears without result.

Worth doing

• Questions and answers. You are allowed to ask and answer your own questions, and you should — the five things customers phone to ask should already be answered there. Left alone, this section gets filled in by strangers guessing, and some of those guesses will be wrong.
• Replying to every review. Covered elsewhere, still the highest-return recurring task on the profile.
• Keeping hours accurate, including holidays. A closed business that says it is open generates one angry review that outlives the mistake by years.

Worth doing if you have the rhythm

• Posts. They expire, they take real effort to write well, and the direct ranking benefit is modest. They do help a profile look alive, and for businesses with genuine news — a new service, seasonal availability, an event — they earn their place. If they become filler, stop.

Worth ignoring for most businesses

• Stuffing keywords into the business name. It works until it does not, and the downside is suspension, which takes weeks to reverse and takes your rankings with it while you wait.
• Products, unless you actually sell discrete products. For a service business it is a lot of data entry for a surface almost nobody reaches.

Service area businesses: the trap

If you travel to customers rather than the reverse, you can hide your address and set a service area. Two things go wrong here constantly.

The first: businesses set an enormous service area in the belief it makes them eligible across all of it. It does not. The service area tells customers where you will travel; it does not override distance as a ranking factor. A radius covering half the country does not put you in the map pack on the far side of it.

The second: businesses that do have a visitable premises hide the address anyway, thinking it looks more professional. If customers can come to you, show it. A verified physical address is a stronger signal than a service area, and it is one of the few places where the honest answer is also the better-performing one.

What to actually measure

The profile reports its own numbers, and most of them are vanity. Views are close to meaningless on their own. The figures we watch:

• Calls, split by day and hour. This tells you when to have someone answering, which is a business decision the profile can inform.
• Direction requests, for a premises. It is the closest thing to intent the platform reports.
• Website clicks, checked against your analytics. A gap between the two usually means the tracking is broken, not that the profile is lying.
• The split between searches for your business name and searches for what you do. The first is people who already knew you. The second is the profile actually earning you customers, and it is the number that should be growing.

If that last split is not moving after a few months of work, the profile is being maintained rather than improved, and something in the prominence work underneath it has stalled.