The Google Business Profile guide.

Most local businesses have a Google Business Profile. Very few have a complete one. The difference between a claimed profile and a complete profile is usually the difference between appearing for your own business name and appearing when someone searches for the service you provide.

A complete profile has a business name that matches the sign on the building, a primary category chosen deliberately, secondary categories for the other work you do, a full list of services with short descriptions, accurate hours including holiday hours, a phone number that rings somewhere a person answers, a link to a relevant page on your site, and a service area or address depending on whether customers come to you.

It also has photos that are actually yours. Exterior shots so people recognize the building, interior shots if customers walk in, team photos, and job photos for service businesses. Profiles with real photos added over time perform better than profiles with three stock images uploaded on the day it was created.

Finally, it has the sections most owners skip: the business description written in plain language, the opening date, attributes that apply, and any products or services listed individually. Every one of those fields is a chance to match what somebody typed into the search bar.

The primary category is the single most consequential setting on the profile. It tells Google what kind of business you are and which searches you are eligible to appear in. A roofing company listed as a general contractor is competing in the wrong pool. Changing that one field has moved businesses into the map results on its own.

Photos affect two different things. They give people a reason to pick you when three listings look otherwise identical, and they signal an account that is being maintained. A profile that received eight new photos this month reads as active. Adding photos regularly matters more than adding a lot of them at once.

Posts are the least used feature on the profile and one of the easiest wins. A post takes two minutes, appears on the listing, and keeps the profile looking current. Job updates, a note about availability, a seasonal service, a new team member. They do not need to be polished.

Review replies are the part that owners most often leave undone. Replying to every review, including the short five star ones, is a visible habit. It tells Google the profile is managed and it tells the next reader that a real person runs this business. For a critical review, a calm and specific reply is far more persuasive to future customers than the review itself is damaging.

The three listings that appear above the regular search results are what people in the industry call the Map Pack. For local service searches, most of the phone calls go to those three. Being fourth is closer to being invisible than it is to being third.

Google decides those three positions on relevance, distance, and prominence. Relevance is how well your categories, services, and description match what was searched. Distance is how close your listed location is to the person searching, which is why a Wenatchee business struggles to appear for someone searching from Leavenworth and why service area settings matter. Prominence is how established you appear: review count and rating, how consistently your name, address, and phone number appear across other sites, and general web presence.

Two of those three are within your control. Relevance is a settings and content problem you can fix in an afternoon. Prominence is a habit you build over months. Distance is mostly fixed, which is why businesses serving several towns need content and service area settings that reflect every town rather than just the one on the sign.

This is also why the Map Pack rewards businesses that keep working on it. The listings are recalculated constantly. A profile that gains four reviews and a dozen photos a month drifts upward. A profile that has not changed in two years drifts down as competitors keep going.

Profile work is not a project with an end date. The businesses that hold their position do a small number of things on repeat.

Ask every finished customer for a review with a direct link, and follow up once. Reply to every review within a few days. Add photos from real jobs at least a few times a month. Publish a short post weekly. Check the questions section, since anyone can answer a question about your business and wrong answers sit there until you correct them. Confirm your hours before every holiday. Review your categories once a quarter, especially if the services you offer have changed.

Watch the insights the profile gives you. Calls, direction requests, and website clicks tell you whether the profile is doing its job, and the search terms report tells you which services people are actually finding you for. Those terms are often different from the ones the owner expected, and they are worth building website pages around.

None of these habits are complicated. They fail because they are nobody's specific job. When we manage a profile, each of these has a schedule, and the calls it produces are logged alongside every other lead so there is no question about whether the work is paying off.