Google Business Profile setup: how to do it properly

How do I set up a Google Business Profile properly?

To 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. Keep it alive with regular photos, a post every few weeks and a reply to every review. Two hours to set up, ten minutes a month to maintain.

Here’s each step in order.

1. Check whether you already have a Google Business Profile

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. Google Business Profile verification: be ready for it

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

Google decides which verification methods it offers you, and for most trades that now means recording a short video. For a business that goes out to customers, Google’s own guidance asks the video to show three things:

• Where you are. Street signs or landmarks near your business address.
• That the business exists. The tools, equipment or branded workwear you use on the job.
• That it’s yours. Opening up your branded van, doing a piece of work, or a document such as an invoice or utility bill with the business name on it.

Do it in daylight, with signal, in one go.

If verification fails. Google tells you what was missing: open your profile on your phone and tap “Review issues”. Record a new video with everything from the first one plus the missing bit, and upload it again. Google says checking a video can take up to five working days, so a failed attempt can set you back a week or more. If video still won’t go through, try another method Google offers you before contacting support.

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. A heating engineer filed only under “Plumber” may never show for the boiler work they want. Scroll the whole category list in your Google Business Profile before you choose, because there are more specific options than most people expect. 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 — a showroom, a garage, a yard they collect from — 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 Google Business 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 extra words into it breaks Google’s guidelines, and competitors do report it.

6. Description and services

The description gives you around 750 characters. Lead with what you do and where, because that’s the bit people read first, 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 space to describe your work in customers’ own words. List the jobs the way people ask for them — a plumber lists “boiler installation”, “boiler servicing”, “leak repair”, “bathroom fitting”, not “plumbing services” — 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 van, the team, shot on a phone — stock photos of someone else’s smiling staff undermine everything else you’ve said. A few new photos a month keeps the profile looking alive.

Questions customers ask. Google has been changing how questions work on Business Profiles, so don’t build your plan around the old Q&A section. Put the answers to what you get asked on the phone — do you cover this town, do you charge a call-out, are you registered — into your description, your services list and your website. That way they’re there for customers, whichever way Google shows questions next.

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

8. Reviews: what Google’s rules allow

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 Google’s review policy bans it. The same policy bans offering anything in return for a review, and discouraging bad ones. And don’t tell people what to write: let them mention what they want to mention.

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 have it done as part of a site — the SEO is built into every build we do, profile included.