Scrabble tiles spelling 'SEO' on a wooden surface. Ideal for digital marketing themes.

14 October 2026

Getting Your Google Business Profile Right

“We’re already on Google.” Owners often say it the moment local search comes up, and they’re usually right. There’s a Business Profile out there with their name on it. Whether it’s doing any work is another matter. Plenty were set up in a hurry years ago by someone who’s since moved on, and nobody’s opened them since. The hours are wrong. The category is vague. The last reply to a review was three summers ago.

In brief

Sort the dull details first. Name, category, address or service area, and hours.
Google’s rules are stricter than a lot of people realise, and stuffing keywords into your business name breaks them.
Ask every customer for a review. Never pay for one.
Your website and your profile should tell the same story, down to the phone number.

Why the profile matters as much as the website

Search for a café, an electrician or an accountant on your phone and you’ll often get a map with a few businesses pinned to it, each with stars, opening times and a button to ring them. That’s Business Profile territory. Someone can decide to call you without ever landing on your website.

Google sorts those local results mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, which we explain in our plain-English guide to how SEO works for a business website. Distance you can’t change. You’re where you are. You can’t buy your way up either, because Google says there’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. What’s left is making the profile accurate, complete and well reviewed. It’s unglamorous work. It’s also where a lot of businesses have ground to make up.

Your business name isn’t a keyword

Google wants the name on your profile to match the name you actually trade under, the one on your van, your signage and your invoices. Extra bits aren’t allowed. Taglines are out. So are lists of services and store codes. ‘Smith Electrical’ is fine. ‘Smith Electrical Emergency Electrician 24/7’ isn’t, however tempting it looks when a competitor’s got away with it for months.

Why follow the rule if others don’t? Partly because anyone can suggest an edit to a profile they think is wrong, and that includes rivals. Mostly because there are proper places for those words. Pick the right category. List your services. Then make sure your website has a page for each one, which is the job of service pages built to turn visitors into enquiries.

Categories do more than you’d think

You get one primary category, the one that best describes the business, and you can add a few more. Google’s help pages say plainly that the categories you choose affect your local ranking. They also tell you not to pick one for every product or service you sell.

Go as specific as the list allows. Google’s own example is ‘Nail salon’ rather than ‘Salon’. An accountancy practice that also runs payroll should lead with the category that best sums up the practice and add one or two that cover the rest. You can’t make up a category of your own, so if nothing fits exactly, choose the closest general one. And look at it again whenever the business shifts direction.

Address, service area and opening hours

If customers come to you, show your address. If you go to them, Google wants the address removed and a service area set instead. That covers roofers, mobile dog groomers, carpet cleaners and any other business run from a home address nobody should be turning up at.

You can list up to 20 service areas, using towns, postcodes or wider regions. You can’t draw a radius around your base. Google also advises keeping the whole area within about two hours’ drive of where you’re based, so listing half the country isn’t on. Some businesses do both. A garden centre that delivers counts as what Google calls a hybrid business, with a shop address and a service area side by side.

One trap catches people out. A rented mailing address or virtual office you don’t actually work from isn’t eligible for a profile. Being able to receive post there doesn’t count.

Hours sound simple. Put in your regular customer-facing hours and add special hours for bank holidays and Christmas. Seasonal businesses, like a seaside ice cream kiosk or a campsite café, can mark themselves temporarily closed in the off-season and switch the hours back on when they reopen. Nobody forgives a locked door they drove twenty minutes to find.

Reviews, and the rules that now have teeth

Google makes asking easy. You can send customers a link or show them a QR code that takes them straight to the review form. Ask everyone, once the job’s done. A handwritten note in a delivery box works. So does a text the day after a boiler service.

A few things are off limits. Offering a discount, a freebie or anything else in return for a review breaks Google’s rules, and so does dangling one to get a review changed or taken down. You can’t discourage bad reviews or quietly ask only the customers you know are happy. Staff reviewing their own employer count as a conflict of interest. Get caught with fake engagement and Google can block new reviews for a while, hide the ones you’ve got, or show customers a warning that fake reviews were removed.

UK law has caught up too. Fake reviews are now banned outright under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, with the relevant provisions in force since 6 April 2025. That covers writing them, commissioning someone else to write them in return for money or any other reward, and publishing incentivised reviews without making the incentive clear. Asking your customers in general whether they’d leave a review is fine, and the CMA’s guidance gives a plain email to customers as an example. Get it wrong and the CMA can now fine a business up to 10% of its global turnover for breaking consumer law. Treat all this as general information rather than legal advice, and talk to a solicitor if you’re unsure about your own set-up.

Then reply. Use the reviewer’s name, mention what they actually said, and don’t leave it a fortnight. That’s Google’s advice and it’s sound. Bad reviews need a reply most of all. Keep it calm and short, and offer to put things right offline. A negative review isn’t necessarily a sign of a badly run business, as Google itself points out, and future customers read the reply as closely as the complaint.

Photos and posts

Google’s tips encourage photos and video to show what you offer. Use real ones. The dining room on a busy Friday. The finished extension with the scaffolding gone. A stock photo of a smiling handshake tells nobody anything.

Posts are short updates that show on your profile in Search and Maps. There are three types. Updates are general news, offers need dates and times, and events have a start and finish. Google checks every post against its content policy after you publish it, and one with a phone number in the text may be rejected if Google can’t confirm the number belongs to you. Posts older than six months are archived unless you’ve set a date range. Google doesn’t say posts help you rank, so treat them as a noticeboard for people already looking at you. A charity shop’s late-night Christmas opening or a training provider’s next course date is exactly the sort of thing that belongs there.

Keep it in step with your website

Your profile and your website should agree with each other. Same name, same address, same phone number, same hours. If they don’t, people don’t know which to believe, and they’ll ring whoever’s easier.

Check the profile every month or so. Google can update details using answers you give to its own calls and messages, and it collects information it asks owners to review for accuracy. A five-minute look stops a wrong closing time sitting there for a season. While you’re at it, look at the website the profile links to. The page needs a clear title and an obvious next step, and our post on how Google uses title tags and meta descriptions covers the first half of that. Our article on structured data and schema markup goes further into describing your business to search engines in code.

Want a hand with it?

A tidy profile on its own won’t carry a business, but a neglected one quietly sends enquiries to whoever’s down the road. If you’d rather someone looked over the profile, the website and the way they fit together, that’s a core part of the work we do on local search visibility, and it sits inside our wider SEO services for business websites. Get in touch and we’ll tell you what we’d fix first.

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Sources

Scott Woodfield

Founder of TWA, Scott harbours over 10 years of digital marketing agency experience. Everything from removing a background of an image to full blown ecommerce solutions from the ground up, Scott's your go to guy for anything marketing & web.

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