How do I set up a Google Business Profile properly?

Claim or create the listing, get it verified, choose the most specific primary category that matches the work you actually want, set an honest service area, then fill in every field — description, services, photos, Q&A. Keep it alive with a monthly post and a reply to every review. Two hours to set up, ten minutes a month to maintain.

1. Check whether you already have one

Before creating anything, search your business name in Google Maps. There’s a decent chance one exists already — Google generates listings automatically, and a marketer you used five years ago may have made one and still be sitting on the login.

If it’s there, claim it rather than creating a second. Duplicates compete with each other, split your reviews, and take weeks to unpick.

2. Get verified, and be ready for it

An unverified profile is close to useless — restricted, and not competing. Everything below depends on getting past this.

Verification is mostly video now. Have ready: signage or a branded van, tools and stock in situ rather than staged on a kitchen table, and something with your name and address on it — a headed invoice, a bill, your certification paperwork. If you have premises, unlocking the door on camera does more than any document. A failed verification is a fortnight lost, so do it in daylight, with signal, in one go.

3. Primary category — the single biggest lever

If you change one thing, change this.

Your primary category decides which searches you’re eligible for at all — not “helps you rank”, eligible for. Get it wrong and nothing else saves you.

Pick the most specific category matching the work you actually want more of. “Hairdresser”, “Hair salon” and “Barber shop” are three separate categories surfacing for three different searches, and a barber filed under the wrong one simply won’t appear. Vague isn’t safer; vague is invisible. Add secondary categories for the other things you genuinely do — true ones only; padding dilutes you.

The test: if the phone rang tomorrow with the perfect job on it, your primary category should be the name of that job.

4. Service area or address

If customers come to you — salon, garage, café, practice — show your address.

If you go to customers, you’re a service area business: hide the address and set service areas instead. Showing a home address you don’t trade from causes verification problems and puts your street on the internet for nothing.

Set areas honestly — the towns you actually work in, not “the Midlands”, and not forty of them. A long list doesn’t extend your reach, it just looks padded.

5. Name, address, phone — identical everywhere

Your details must match exactly across your profile, website, Checkatrade, Yell, Facebook, any trade body listing and your signage. “Ltd” versus “Limited” counts, and so does an old mobile on a directory you’d forgotten.

The name field is your business name, not “Dave’s Plumbing — Emergency Plumber Leicester 24/7”. Stuffing it is the most reported violation in local search, and competitors do report it.

6. Description and services

The description gives you around 750 characters. Lead with what you do and where — Google and the AI summaries above the results read that opening line hardest — then the specifics customers want: certifications, specialisms, emergency cover, how long you’ve been going. No fluff about passion; nobody ever chose a plumber for the word “bespoke”.

The services section is the one everyone skips, and it’s free keyword real estate. List the jobs in the words customers use — a garage lists “MOT”, “clutch replacement”, “diagnostics”, “air con regas”, not “vehicle servicing” — each with a couple of plain sentences. Ten to fifteen proper entries beats three vague ones.

7. Keep it alive

Photos. A dozen dated shots looks abandoned next to a hundred. Finished work, the premises, the team, shot on a phone — stock photos of someone else’s smiling staff undermine everything else you’ve said. Five a week and nobody local touches you by spring.

Q&A. You can post and answer your own questions — do it before someone else fills the space in wrongly. Fifteen or so covering what you get asked on the phone: do you cover this town, do you charge for callouts, are you registered. These get pulled into AI summaries and voice results.

Posts. One every few weeks, with a photo and the town name — “new shopfront fitted in Asfordby this week”. It doesn’t need to be clever.

8. Reviews — and the rules changed this year

Google tightened this in April 2026, and a lot of standard advice is now explicitly banned.

You can ask any customer, plainly, every time. Send a link, put it on the invoice, reply to every review within a day or two.

You can’t ask only your happy ones — filtering people through a “how did we do?” step and sending the Google link only to those who said “great” is review gating, and it’s banned. No offering anything in return. No telling people what to write, including asking them to mention a service, a town or a staff member. No review targets for staff.

Ask everyone, the same way, every time, and let them say what they say. Reply to the bad ones calmly and briefly — a measured reply to a one-star does more for you than the one-star does against you.

(And stop relying on profile messaging — Google switched it off in 2024.)

The trap at the end of all this

Do the above and people find you — then tap through to your website, because before ringing a stranger who’s coming to their house they want to check you’re real. If that link goes to nothing, or to a Facebook page, you’ve done all this work to send people somewhere that loses the job.

Which is the question we get asked more than any other.

Or hand it over — our SEO work covers the profile and the site behind it.