For a local business, your Google Business Profile does more work than your website. It is what appears in the map pack when somebody searches “plumber near me”, it is where your hours come from, and it is the first thing most people see. It is free, and in the profiles I look at it is usually half filled in: no services listed, no products, no posts, and photos from whenever it was set up.
Claim it before you do anything else
A listing usually exists before you make one. Google generates them from public data, which means yours may already be out there with a wrong phone number.
Search your business name plus your neighbourhood. If a panel appears on the right, the listing exists. Look for “Own this business?” or “Claim this business”. Verification is by postcard, phone, or video depending on the category, and the postcard route takes a couple of weeks.
If someone else has claimed it, a previous marketer or a former partner, you can request access through the same flow. It is tedious and it works.
The fields that actually matter
Primary category. This is the single highest impact field on the whole profile. “Restaurant” and “Vietnamese restaurant” produce different results. Pick the most specific category that is accurate, then add secondary categories for the rest.
Services or menu. Every service you offer, listed individually with a short description. This is text Google can read and match against searches. Most owners list three things and stop.
Hours, including holidays. Wrong hours generate a bad review eventually. Set special hours for statutory holidays in advance; Google prompts you and almost nobody does it.
Service area, if you travel. If you go to customers rather than the other way round, set a service area instead of leaning on your address. List the actual municipalities: Etobicoke, Scarborough, Mississauga, whichever are true.
Photos, and keep adding them. Profiles with recent photos get more engagement, and “recent” is the operative word. A dozen photos from 2019 is a dormant listing. Add a few every month.
Products. Underused, free, and it lets you put priced items directly in the panel.
Consistency is the boring part that works
Your business name, address and phone number should be byte for byte identical everywhere they appear: your website, your listing, Yelp, Yellow Pages, your Facebook page, industry directories.
“Suite 4” on one and “#4” on another is enough to make matching harder. This is unglamorous and it is most of what local SEO actually is.
Reviews, and how to answer them
Ask for reviews out loud, at the moment somebody is happy. That is the whole technique and it beats every clever alternative.
Answer all of them, including the good ones, briefly. For a bad one: acknowledge, do not argue, and move it off the platform. “Sorry that happened, can you call me at [number] so I can sort it out” reads well to the next hundred people who see it. Arguing in public has never once worked.
You cannot get an honest review removed. You can bury it under recent, better ones.
Posts
Google Posts appear in your panel and expire after about a week. Weekly is enough: an offer, an event, something new. It is a small signal that the listing is alive, and it takes five minutes.
What to expect
The map pack ranks on relevance, distance and prominence. You cannot change distance. Relevance is categories, services and your website’s content. Prominence is reviews, consistency and links.
A profile that is complete, consistent and active will beat a profile that is not, in the same postcode, most of the time. It will not beat physics: someone searching from three kilometres away will usually see the closer business first.
If you would rather not
Setting this up properly is about two hours if you know the fields. I do it as a one time add-on for $150, or it is included in Starter SEO at $500 a month if you want it maintained rather than set and forgotten.
Either way, do it. It is the highest return free thing available to a local business, and most of your competitors have not bothered.