Home › Setting up your Google Business Profile
Your free listing on the map
Google Business Profile is the panel showing your opening hours, phone number, photos, reviews and map location. It is free, it takes an afternoon to set up properly, and for many local businesses it generates more enquiries than the website does.
Claiming it
- Search for your business name — a listing may already exist, created automatically or by a customer.
- If it exists, claim it. If not, create one.
- Verify ownership. This is usually a postcard, phone call or video, and it can take a week or two.
- Once verified, you control what appears.
Filling it in properly
- Categories. Pick the most specific primary category that fits, then add secondary ones. This has a large effect on which searches you appear for.
- Description. Explain what you do and who for, plainly. Not a sales pitch.
- Hours. Accurate, including special hours for holidays. Turning up to a business listed as open when it is not produces angry reviews.
- Photographs. Real ones. Your premises, your work, your team, your van. Listings with genuine photos get considerably more engagement than those with a logo and nothing else.
- Services and products. List them individually — each becomes something you can be found for.
- Attributes. Wheelchair access, parking, card payments. Small details that decide who chooses you.
Do not stuff the name field. Adding keywords to your business name — "Smith Plumbing Emergency Leeds Boiler Repair" — is against the rules and gets reported by competitors. Use the name you actually trade under.
Keeping it alive
An active listing outperforms a dormant one. Post occasionally — an offer, a finished job, a seasonal note. Answer the questions people post. Add photos as you go. None of this takes long, but doing it monthly beats doing it once.
Handling reviews
Ask every happy customer, and make it a habit rather than a campaign. Send a direct link so it takes one tap.
Reply to everything. For positive reviews, briefly and personally. For negative ones, calmly, without arguing, offering to sort it out offline. Everyone reading is judging your reply far more than the complaint — a measured response to an unfair review does you more good than the review does harm.
Never buy reviews. It is obvious, it is against the rules, and it puts your entire listing at risk.
Common questions
I work from home. Do I have to show my address?
No. Set yourself up as a service-area business and specify the areas you cover instead.
Someone left a review that is not about my business.
You can report reviews that break the rules. It is not fast, but genuinely irrelevant or abusive reviews do get removed.
Do I still need a website?
Yes. The listing is rented space on someone else's platform, with limited control and no guarantee it stays free or unchanged. It works best pointing at a site you own.
Related pages
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