Google Business Profile Optimization Checklist

Most local businesses treat Google Business Profile as a one-time setup. You claim it, type the address, upload a logo, and never open it again. Then you wonder why the competitor two streets over outranks you despite having fewer reviews.

Ranking in the map pack is a combination of relevance, distance and prominence. Reviews feed prominence. But relevance comes almost entirely from how completely and accurately you have described what you do — and that is the part you fully control.

Get your primary category right

This is the highest-leverage field on the entire profile and the one most often wrong. Google uses your primary category to decide which searches you are even eligible for. "Contractor" and "Roofing contractor" are not interchangeable; the second will appear for roofing searches and the first largely will not.

Pick the most specific category that genuinely describes your main business, then add secondary categories for real additional services. Do not stuff categories you do not actually serve — it dilutes relevance and can get the profile flagged.

Fill in services, with descriptions

Under the Services section you can list individual services and write a short description for each. Almost nobody does this. It is free text that tells Google precisely what you offer, and it shows up when customers are comparing options.

Write them the way customers say them, not the way your industry says them. "Drain unblocking" rather than "hydro-jetting remediation."

Hours, including the awkward ones

• Set regular hours accurately — being marked open when you are closed generates one-star reviews that have nothing to do with your work
• Set special hours for public holidays before they arrive, not after
• If you are a service-area business, hours mean "when someone can reach you", not "when the office door is unlocked"

Photos, and keep adding them

Profiles with photos get meaningfully more clicks for directions and calls. The important part is that this is not a one-off upload: a profile that gains new photos every month looks active, and active profiles perform better than dormant ones.

Prioritise exterior shots so people can recognise the building, team photos so they know who is arriving, and genuine before-and-after work. Avoid stock imagery — customers spot it immediately and it reads as a business with nothing real to show.

Products, attributes and the small boxes

Attributes ("wheelchair accessible", "free parking", "women-owned") are filters customers actually use to narrow results. Each one you set is a search you can appear in and a competitor cannot.

Then let reviews do their job

Once the profile is genuinely complete, reviews become the compounding factor. A steady flow of recent reviews signals an operating business; a profile with forty reviews all from the same fortnight two years ago signals a campaign that ended.

The practical sequence is: finish the profile once, properly, then put a repeatable review habit in place and leave it running.