For most local businesses, the Google Business Profile — the panel that appears on Maps and in search when someone looks for what you do — is seen by more potential customers than the website is. It's free, it takes an afternoon to do properly, and it's usually the first thing a stranger uses to judge whether you're a safe pair of hands.
Yet most profiles we look at are half-finished: set up once, years ago, and quietly drifting out of date. Here's what "done properly" actually means, field by field.
The checklist
Work through these on your own profile. Every one has a concrete answer.
- Business name — exactly your real name. No bolted-on keywords ("Smith Plumbing | Boiler Repair Leicester"). It reads as spam to customers, and it's against Google's rules — profiles get suspended for it.
- Categories — the right primary, plus the extras. Your primary category is the strongest signal for which searches you appear in. Pick the most specific one that fits ("Bathroom fitter", not "Contractor"), then add every secondary category you genuinely serve.
- Opening hours — true ones, including holidays. A customer who arrives at a closed door, or rings a "open now" business that doesn't answer, doesn't come back. Set special hours for bank holidays before Google guesses for you.
- Phone number and website — working, and the same everywhere. The number here should match the one on your website and anywhere else you're listed. Mismatches quietly erode both trust and search visibility.
- Services listed — the ones you actually want. List the work you do and want more of, with a line of plain description each. This is what tells Google — and the customer — what you're actually for.
- The description — written for a person. A short paragraph, in plain English, answering: what you do, who for, where. Not a keyword paragraph — nobody chooses a business because its description says "Leicester" nine times.
- Photos — real, recent, yours. Photos of actual work, your van, your premises, your team — uploaded within recent months, not once in 2021. Real photos are the strongest "these people actually exist" signal a profile can carry.
- Reviews — asked for, and replied to. Ask every satisfied customer at the moment the job lands well. Then reply to every review — especially the awkward ones. How you answer a poor review tells the next customer more than the review itself.
- Q&A — check what's sitting there. Anyone can ask (and answer) questions on your profile. If nobody's watching, wrong answers sit there in your name. Check it; answer the real questions properly.
- The map pin — where you actually are. Wrong or vague pins send customers to the wrong place and can drag your visibility in the area you actually serve.
The three that matter most
If you do nothing else: categories, reviews and replies, and recent real photos. Those three carry most of the weight in whether you appear and whether you're chosen. The rest is hygiene — necessary, but these three move the needle.
Make it monthly, not once
A profile isn't "done" — it drifts. Hours change, photos age, reviews arrive unanswered. A fifteen-minute monthly pass (new photos in, reviews replied, hours still true) keeps it working. Put it in the calendar or it won't happen.
Where this fits
A complete profile makes you visible and credible. Whether visibility is actually your bottleneck — or whether enquiries are arriving and quietly leaking somewhere else — is a different question, and it's exactly what the Business Improvement Review answers: a structured look at the evidence, ending in one clear written verdict on what's worth fixing first.