Your Google Business Profile is probably a third finished

Here’s something that surprises a lot of local business owners: for many of them, their Google Business Profile matters more than their website does.

Think about how it actually happens. Someone searches on their phone for what you do. They see the map results, tap a listing, glance at the hours and the reviews and a few photos, and call. They never reach anyone’s website at all.

That profile is free. Which makes it frustrating that most of the ones we look at are about a third complete.

How Google decides who shows up

Three factors, and it helps to know which ones you can move.

Relevance is how well your profile matches what someone typed. This is mostly categories and services, and it’s where almost all the available improvement sits.

Distance is how far you are from the searcher. You cannot change this. A surprising amount of energy gets wasted trying to rank in suburbs a business isn’t in.

Prominence is how well known and well regarded you are. Reviews, mentions of your business elsewhere online, and your website.

So: categories and reviews. That’s where the work is.

The basics people get wrong

Use your actual trading name. Not “Smith Plumbing Parramatta Emergency 24/7”. Stuffing keywords into your business name breaches Google’s guidelines, competitors do report it, and profiles get suspended over it.

Choose address or service area, not both. If customers come to you, show the address. If you work from home and travel to customers, hide the address and set a service area instead. There’s a toggle for it. Getting this wrong can suppress your listing entirely.

Keep your name, address and phone identical everywhere. Your website, your Facebook page, any directory you’re in. “St” on one and “Street” on another is a small inconsistency, but they add up.

Set your holiday hours now. Not in December. Now, for the whole summer. Google prompts you about this every year and almost everyone dismisses it. A customer who drives to a business that’s unexpectedly closed doesn’t just go home. They leave a one-star review about it.

The one that matters most: your primary category

Your primary category does more to determine what you rank for than anything else on the profile. Most people set it once, quickly, when they first created the listing, and never look at it again.

Here’s how to check yours. Search for your main service the way a customer would phrase it. Look at the businesses appearing in the map results. Work out what category they’re using.

If three competitors are all listed as “Bathroom remodeler” and you’re sitting on “Contractor”, you have just found your problem.

Be as specific as the category list allows. “Mexican restaurant” beats “Restaurant”. “Family law attorney” beats “Lawyer”. Specificity wins, every time.

Then add every secondary category that genuinely applies. Genuinely being the important word. Categories for work you don’t actually do will bring you enquiries you can’t service, which wastes everyone’s afternoon.

The section almost everyone leaves empty

Services.

You can list every service you offer individually, each with its own description, and hardly anyone does it. It’s free space on a free profile and it directly feeds the relevance signal.

Write two or three real sentences for each one, in the words a customer would use rather than the words your industry uses. If you do fifteen things, that’s fifteen entries. Yes, it takes about an hour. It is the single best hour you will spend on this.

Reviews are a process, not luck

Businesses with a hundred reviews are not better than you. They ask every single time.

Ask at the moment of visible satisfaction — job finished, customer happy, you’re standing right there. Not three weeks later in an email nobody opens.

Get your review link from the profile (there’s a “Get more reviews” button that generates one), shorten it, and save it as a text message template on your phone. Something like:

“Really glad that worked out. If you’ve got a minute, a quick Google review makes a genuine difference to a small business like ours. I’ll text you the link now.”

Then send it while you’re still standing there.

What you must not do: offer discounts or gifts in exchange for reviews. That breaches Google’s policy and, depending on how it’s done, Australian Consumer Law. Don’t review yourself. Don’t buy reviews, because they get detected and removed and they can take your profile with them.

Responding, especially to the bad ones

Reply to everything. Positive reviews get a short, specific, human response, not “Thanks for your feedback” pasted fifty times, which reads exactly like the bot it is.

Negative reviews are where this is actually won or lost. Reply within a day. Stay calm. Don’t argue publicly and don’t explain why the reviewer is wrong, even when they are.

Remember who you’re writing for. You are not writing to the angry person. You are writing to the next hundred people who read that exchange while deciding whether to call you. A measured reply to an unfair review makes you look better than having no negative reviews at all.

Then keep it alive

Ten minutes a month. Add two or three photos, respond to new reviews, post once. Every quarter, check your categories still match what you actually do. Once a year, audit the whole thing and set next year’s holiday hours.

Put it in your calendar as a recurring task, because if it isn’t in the calendar it won’t happen.

Do it with us, in October

We’re running Get Found Locally as part of NSW Small Business Month 2026.

It’s a free 30-minute session focused on the handful of things that move the needle most: your primary category, the services section nobody fills in, and a review request process that actually works. We demonstrate each one on screen so you can copy it straight afterwards.

Have your profile open while you watch and you can make most of these changes as we go.

Thursday 22 October 2026, 10:00am to 10:30am AEDT. Online. Free.

You’ll get the full maintenance checklist afterwards, covering the parts we don’t have time for on the day.

Register for Get Found Locally — free, Thursday 22 October