Your Google Business Profile and website should work together

An honest thing for a web studio to admit: for many local searches, your website is not the first thing a customer sees. Your Google Business Profile is.

Someone searches for a barber near them. They see a map, three businesses, star ratings, hours, and buttons to call or get directions. They tap a name, read a few reviews, look at two photos and call. The website never opened.

The two do different jobs. The profile helps people find you and check you out. The website explains what you offer, shows your work and takes the booking or enquiry. When they agree with each other, both work better. Managing the profile is free, so start there.

Choose the right primary category

Your primary category tells Google what your business mainly is, and it shapes which searches you appear in. Choose the most specific category that accurately describes your main activity. Google's business guidelines explain the rules.

Be specific where it is accurate: a roofing contractor and a general contractor are different businesses. Add secondary categories for the other things you genuinely do.

A useful five minute exercise: search for the service you want to be found for, look at the businesses in the map results, and check which categories they use.

Match the address and service area to how you work

If customers visit you at a staffed location, show the address. If you go to customers instead, hide the address and list your service areas. If you do both, you can show both. Google's service area guidance explains the difference.

List the places you actually serve. Google allows up to 20 service areas and asks that the overall area stay within about two hours' drive of your base. If you work from home and do not receive customers there, keep your home address hidden.

Write your services the way customers say them

Fill in the services section with the real work you do, described in plain language. "Furnace not blowing heat" is how a worried homeowner searches. "HVAC diagnostics" is how the industry talks. Use both where they fit, starting with the customer's words.

Keep your hours right, especially on holidays

Wrong hours are worse than missing hours. Someone who drives across the city to a closed shop does not come back, and sometimes leaves a review about it.

Set special hours for every holiday and temporary change, and check them before each long weekend. If you take calls outside your posted hours, say so in your description.

Add photos on a schedule

A profile whose newest photo is from 2022 looks neglected. You need three kinds:

• The outside, from the direction people approach, so they recognize it from the car.
• The inside, so they know what they are walking into.
• The work: finished jobs, plated food, the chair, the truck.

Start with ten good ones, then add two or three a month. Your phone is fine.

Reviews, and your replies

Google names relevance, distance and prominence as the main factors in local results, and says review count and rating contribute to prominence.

Ask every customer for an honest review after the work is done. Google lets you share a direct review link or QR code. Never offer anything in exchange, and do not only ask the people you expect to be happy.

Reply to every review. Two lines is plenty. For a critical one, respond once, calmly and factually, and invite them to contact you directly. You are not really writing to the reviewer. You are writing to the next hundred people who read it.

Never buy reviews. A sudden burst of five star ratings with no text is exactly the kind of pattern that gets noticed.

The parts most businesses skip

Common questions. Parking, walk ins, accessibility, payment options. Answer them in your profile wherever the fields allow, and on your website.

Products. Underused and very visible. Worth adding if you sell anything with a name and a price.

Posts. Use them for real news: new hours, a new service, a seasonal offer. Pick a pace you can keep up.

Your website link. Point it at the page that best represents that location, and add a booking link if you take bookings. Make sure the page works well on a phone, because that is where the click comes from.

If you only have twenty minutes a month, spend them making sure customers can trust your hours, contact details and photos.

The monthly routine

Twenty minutes, same day each month: add two or three photos, reply to new reviews, check your hours and holiday hours, add a post, and look for any "suggested edits" to your listing that you did not make. That last step catches the occasional wrong change from a stranger or a competitor.

Then glance at the profile's own numbers (calls, direction requests and website clicks) to see what it is bringing in.