What is Google Business Profile?
The Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is a listing hosted by Google carrying name, address, phone number, opening hours, category, photos and reviews. It appears in Google Maps and in the local results block above the classic listings. Creating and maintaining it is free; verification runs by post, phone or video depending on the business model.
Google names three factors for local ranking in its own help pages: relevance, distance and prominence. Two of them are within your control. You steer relevance through the primary category, the services listed and the description; prominence is built through reviews, mentions and links outside the profile. Distance from the searcher is fixed.
The most common trap is the name: it has to match the real-world business name, and keywords or location descriptors are not permitted under the guidelines. If you travel to customers rather than receiving them, hide the address and set a service area instead. Google reserves the right to suspend profiles that breach the guidelines - and then the channel disappears without warning.
Why does Google Business Profile matter?
The profile is not a nameplate for existing clients. In BrightLocal's analysis of more than 45,000 listings, 84 per cent of views came from category and service searches and only 16 per cent from searches for the business name. The study dates from 2019, but the ratio still describes the role of the profile: it is a channel for people who do not know you yet.
Google Business Profile in practice
- 01Primary category "tax adviser" rather than "consulting firm": the primary category is the single most consequential content decision in the profile.
- 02A trades business without a shopfront hides the private address and defines the districts it serves instead.
- 03Enter public holidays in advance: if you are closed at the time of the search, the profile slips back for part of those queries.
From the journal
- Address, opening hours, phone number: your website is the refereeGoogle and Apple change your opening hours when users report something and check the change against public sources, first of all your website. When your core details read differently in different places, it is not your profile that decides but what your own site says. How often customers run into wrong details, how a change gets into your profile, which places really count, what happens with holidays, a move or a new number, and how to set one source everyone believes.
- What a rebrand costs and when it is not worth itThe design quote is the smallest line on the bill. Britain's roads authority produced its new identity entirely in-house, at no external cost, and still spent more than the whole changeover had been budgeted for. What trade mark protection actually costs, what a domain change does to your visibility, and how to spot that a new name will not fix your problem.
- Getting Google reviews without begging for them83 per cent of people who are asked for a review go on to write one. Yet most businesses treat the ask like an awkward favour: too late, in the wrong channel, or with shortcuts that are outright banned. When asking is allowed, when it legally becomes advertising, and why your reply to a review matters more than the review itself.
