Google Business Profile management
The listing is doing the local heavy lifting
For a business that serves people nearby, the Google Business Profile is often the first thing a customer looks at and sometimes the only thing. It decides whether you appear in the map pack, it answers questions before anyone reaches your website, and it can be changed by the public and by Google without telling you. Most are set up once and never opened again.
- Cadence
- Weekly, with a monthly readout
- Covers
- Posts, photos, Q&A, reviews, hours
- Also claimed
- Bing Places, Apple Business Connect
- From
- $195 per month / month
The problem
Set up once, years ago, and never opened since
The common state of a profile: one category, a description written in a hurry, four photos from the week you launched, no services listed, a Q&A where the only question was asked by a stranger and answered by nobody, and two dozen reviews with no replies.
Meanwhile the listing keeps working, badly. Google fills the gaps with its own inferences, the public can suggest edits to your hours and address, questions appear from people who do not work for you, and duplicates surface after a move or a rebrand. Nobody notices, because nobody is looking.
Check yours for these
- One category, where the competitors above you have a primary and several secondaries
- No services or products listed, so the listing cannot match a specific search
- Photos that are all from the same week, several years ago
- Reviews with no replies, including the critical ones
- Questions in the Q&A answered by members of the public, or not at all
- Hours that were right before the last holiday, and a suggested edit you never approved
What is included
What we do to the listing, every month
This is an operational service. The value is that someone is looking at it on a schedule — not that any individual task is clever.
Set up and correct, once
- Primary and secondary categories tested against what ranks locally
- A full services or products list, each with a description
- The business description rewritten inside Google’s character limit
- Service areas, hours, holiday hours, attributes and the contact or booking link
- Duplicate, unclaimed and stale listings identified and resolved
- Ownership moved into an account your business controls
Publish, weekly
- Posts tied to something real — a job finished, a question customers keep asking, a seasonal change
- Photos from actual work, captioned, replacing the launch-week set
- Products or services updated when the offer changes
- Offers and events published while they are still true, and removed when they are not
- Opening hours updated before each holiday rather than after it
Reviews
- Every review replied to, in your voice, within a few days
- A documented request process that asks at the right moment
- An escalation path for the review that needs a phone call rather than a reply
- Removal requested only where a review genuinely breaches Google’s policy
- Review themes summarised monthly, because they are free customer research
Watch and defend
- Monitoring for public suggested edits to your name, address, hours or category
- Q&A watched and answered before a stranger answers it for you
- Alerts when a listing goes unverified, gets merged, or is suspended
- Reinstatement handled if a suspension happens, including the appeal and the evidence
- A backup of photos and profile content, so a lost listing is not a lost history
Report
- Calls, direction requests, website clicks and messages, from the profile’s own performance data
- The search terms Google reports people used to find the listing
- Map-pack visibility across a grid of nearby points
- What we changed this month, and what we recommend next
- A plain-language note whenever Google changes the product itself
For reference
Profile management or local SEO
The same line is drawn on the local SEO page. These are two services with two prices, and this is which task sits in which.
| The task | Profile management | Local SEO |
|---|---|---|
| Choosing primary and secondary categories | Yes — and it is the first thing we fix | Uses the same decision; scoped once if you buy both |
| Posts, photos, offers and Q&A upkeep | Yes, weekly | No. None of this ranks your website |
| Replying to reviews | Yes, every one | No, though review language feeds the site copy |
| Building the review request process | Set up and run here | Designed here; the running of it is profile management |
| Writing location and service-area pages | No | Yes — this is website work |
| LocalBusiness structured data on your site | No | Yes, and it has to match the profile exactly |
| Citations and directory consistency | Listings we touch are kept consistent | Yes — the full audit and cleanup sits here |
| Earning local links and press | No | Yes, and it is the slowest part of the work |
| Suspension and reinstatement | Yes, including the appeal | No |
Our process
How the first ninety days run
Front-loaded on purpose. Month one is a repair job; after that it settles into a routine.
Understand needs
Audit the listing and the field
Everything currently on your profile, plus the profiles of whoever is beating you in the map pack: categories, review counts, photo volume, services listed. You find out quickly whether you have a profile problem or a prominence problem.
You get: Profile audit and competitor comparison
Strategize
Decide the categories and the content plan
Category choice is the single most consequential field on the listing and the easiest one to get wrong. We agree the primary, the secondaries, the services list, and what you will realistically have to post about each week.
You get: Category decision and a quarter’s content plan
Create & build
Rebuild the profile properly
Every field completed, duplicates cleared, photos replaced, services written out, Q&A seeded with the questions you genuinely get asked, and the review request switched on with your team briefed.
You get: A complete profile and a live review process
Optimize & grow
Run it, measure it, defend it
Weekly publishing, review replies, suggested-edit monitoring, and a monthly readout against the grid baseline. When Google changes the product — which it does regularly — we tell you what moved and whether it matters.
You get: Monthly report: calls, directions, grid visibility
Honest scoping
Worth paying for — or do it yourself
Worth outsourcing if
- Nobody internally owns the listing, so it has not been touched in a year
- You rely on local customers and the map pack is where they find you
- You have several locations and the admin has quietly become a job
- You have had a suspension, a duplicate or a hijacked listing before
- Reviews arrive and nobody replies, including to the critical ones
Do it yourself if
- Someone on your team already enjoys this and does it weekly — they will do it better than any agency
- Your customers are national or online and nobody searches for you by location
- The business genuinely has no in-person contact with customers, in which case it may not be eligible for a profile at all
- You want posts published for the sake of activity. It is not a volume game and it does not need daily output
- You expect profile work to rank your website. It will not — that is local SEO
One more thing. This is an unglamorous retainer and we would rather you knew that up front. If your team can own it, ask and we will send you the checklist we work from so you can run it yourselves.
Questions
Before you ask us
The things people ask about Google Business Profile Management before they get in touch. If yours is not here, ask directly — you will get a straight answer rather than a brochure.
Ask a questionIs this not just posting on Google every week?
Posting is the most visible part and the least important. What moves visibility is category and services accuracy, review volume and replies, photo freshness, resolving duplicates, and catching the edits Google and the public make to your listing. Posts matter mainly because they keep the listing demonstrably active and answer questions before someone has to call to ask.
Will managing my profile improve my website’s rankings?
No, and anyone implying otherwise is selling you the wrong service. Profile work moves the map pack and Maps. Your website’s position in the organic results below the map is moved by the site itself — pages, links, speed, structure. That is local SEO, and the table above sets out exactly which task belongs where.
My listing was suspended. Can you get it back?
Often, yes. Suspensions usually trace to something specific: an address that does not meet the eligibility rules, a name stuffed with keywords, a category that does not match the business, or a bulk edit that looked like abuse. We work out the likely cause, correct it, and file the reinstatement with documentation. What we will not do is reapply with the same problem in place and hope for a different reviewer.
Can competitors or the public really change my listing?
Yes. Suggested edits to hours, address, category and even your business name can come from the public and can go live before you notice, and Google itself infers details it believes are missing. Q&A is open to anyone. Monitoring for this is a real part of the job, and it is why an unmanaged listing drifts away from the truth over time.
Do you handle Bing and Apple as well?
Yes, as setup rather than weekly management. Bing Places and Apple Business Connect get claimed, completed and kept consistent with Google, because they feed assistants, in-car navigation and other map products. The volume is much smaller, so they do not need the same cadence.
What does profile management cost?
It starts at $195 per month a month, with month one priced higher where there is a genuine repair job — duplicates, a suspension, or a listing that has to be rebuilt field by field. Additional locations are quoted per location. Current ranges are on the pricing page.
Please note. Google changes Business Profile features regularly — fields appear, get renamed and occasionally disappear, and what is available differs by business category and by country. Everything described here reflects the product as it works at the time of writing, and telling you when that changes is part of the service.
We will audit the listing before you buy anything
Send us your business name and city. You get a written read on your profile against the competitors currently beating you in the map pack — categories, reviews, photos, the gaps — whether or not you go on to hire us.