The Google Business Profile checklist that works

For a business with a physical address or a defined service area, the Google Business Profile is usually worth more traffic than the website — and it is the thing most owners set up once, in a hurry, and never return to.

This is what we check, in the order we check it, and why each item is on the list rather than the dozens that are not.

First: is your website even linked?

Start here, because it is the most common omission we find and the most expensive. An unlinked profile and an unclaimed website are, to Google, two separate things that happen to share a name. Linking them is what merges their signals into one entity.

Without that link your profile cannot send traffic anywhere, your site gets none of the trust the profile has earned, and — if another business shares your name — Google has no way to tell which site belongs to which company.

Name, address and phone: consistency beats optimisation

Your NAP — name, address, phone — should be byte-identical everywhere it appears: the profile, your website footer, your contact page, your directory listings, your invoices.

• Name: your real business name. Not “Bizup LLC | Seattle Web Design & SEO”. Keyword stuffing the name field is against Google's guidelines, is a common cause of suspension, and competitors can and do report it.
• Address: exactly as it appears on your other listings, including whether you write “Suite” or “Ste”.
• Phone: one number, matching your site. A different number on the profile than on the website is a contradiction Google has to resolve, and it resolves it by trusting both a little less.

Categories: the one field with the most direct effect

Your primary category does more to determine which searches you appear for than any other single field. “Web designer”, “Marketing agency” and “Internet marketing service” are different categories that surface for different queries.

1. Pick the primary category that matches what you most want to be found for, not the one that describes everything you do.
2. Add secondary categories for genuine services — but each one you add dilutes slightly, so do not add twenty.
3. Look at what the businesses ranking above you use. Their primary category is visible in the page source of their profile.

Reviews: quantity, recency and replies

Reviews influence both ranking and whether anyone clicks. Three things matter more than the average score:

Reply to every review, including the bad ones, and reply like a person rather than a template. The reply is not for the reviewer — they have moved on. It is for the next person reading, who is deciding whether you are the kind of business that takes a complaint seriously.

Photos, hours and the fields people skip

• Photos: profiles with photos get materially more direction requests and clicks. Add real ones — your premises, your team, your finished work. Stock photography is obvious and does nothing.
• Hours: keep them current, and set special hours for holidays. Showing “open” when you are closed is the fastest way to earn a one-star review.
• Services and products: these populate structured sections of the profile and give Google more to match a query against.
• Description: 750 characters, and it is not a ranking factor — write it for the person reading, not for keywords.
• Q&A: anyone can answer a question on your profile, including a competitor. Seed it with the questions you actually get asked, and answer them yourself.

Tie the profile back to your website

The profile and the site should corroborate each other. On the website side that means:

• A LocalBusiness or more specific schema.org block carrying the same name, address, phone and hours.
• The profile URL listed in that schema's sameAs array, which is the website's half of the same claim the profile makes by linking to you.
• A location page for each area you genuinely serve, with content specific to it — not the same page with the city name swapped.

If you want the detail on how that markup works and what it does, we wrote structured data, plainly.

What does not matter as much as people think

• Posts. Worth doing for the people who see them, but we have never measured a ranking effect from posting weekly.
• The description. Google has stated it is not used for ranking. Write it for humans.
• Adding every possible category. Relevance beats coverage.
• Service-area padding. Listing fifty towns you have never worked in does not make you rank in them, and it makes the profile less credible to the people reading it.

A realistic order of work

1. Link your website. Today.
2. Make NAP identical across the profile, the site and your top five directory listings.
3. Fix the primary category.
4. Reply to every existing review, then build a habit of asking for new ones.
5. Add ten real photographs.
6. Add schema to the website that matches the profile, including sameAs.
7. Then, and only then, worry about posts and Q&A.

We do this work as a standalone engagement or as part of local SEO. Either way the first thing we will ask for is access to the profile, because almost everything above needs it.