Google Business Profile optimisation: a practical field guide

A Google Business Profile does most of its work through five fields: the primary category, the services list, the hours, the photos, and the reviews you answer. Most profiles are filled in once at launch and never touched again, which is exactly why a maintained profile can outrank a larger competitor in the map results. Here is what to fix today, what to keep up weekly, and what quietly gets profiles suspended.

Start with categories, because everything downstream follows them

Your primary category is the strongest single control on the profile. It shapes the set of searches you can appear for and which extra fields Google offers you: a category of "dentist" brings up appointment links and health attributes, "restaurant" brings up menus and reservations, "software company" adds almost nothing beyond the basics. Choose the category that describes the transaction, not the aspiration.

Work through it in this order:

1. Write down the three services that bring in the most revenue, in the words a customer would use.
2. Search those terms in an incognito window from the neighbourhood you serve and look at who appears in the map pack.
3. Open two or three of those competitor profiles and note the category shown under the business name. That is their primary.
4. Set your primary to the category that matches your best-selling service, then add secondary categories only for services you genuinely deliver and can prove on your website.
5. Give the change two to four weeks before you judge it, and change one thing at a time.

Secondary categories are additive but not free. Each one is a claim, and a profile carrying eight loosely related categories reads as vague to both the ranking system and the person deciding whether to call. Three to five well-chosen categories is usually plenty.

Fill in services, hours and attributes properly

The services list is one of the most under-used fields on the profile. Add every service as its own entry with a short description written in plain customer language, and keep the naming consistent with the service pages on your website so the two reinforce each other. If a service has a dedicated page, the wording should match; our notes on SEO and content go deeper on that alignment.

Hours deserve more care than they usually get. Set regular hours honestly, then add special hours for every statutory holiday you can see on the calendar for the next twelve months. In British Columbia that means New Year's Day, Family Day, Good Friday, Victoria Day, Canada Day, BC Day, Labour Day, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Thanksgiving, Remembrance Day and Christmas Day. A profile that says "open" when the door is locked collects one-star reviews that have nothing to do with your work.

Attributes are the quiet conversion field. Wheelchair-accessible entrance and washroom, on-site parking, gender-neutral washroom, appointment required, payment methods accepted, languages spoken, and any identity attributes that genuinely apply to the business: these appear as filters and as badges, and they answer the question that decides whether someone gets in the car.

A profile that is accurate at seven on a Sunday evening earns more calls than a clever one that is only true on a Tuesday at noon.

Photos, posts and the questions people are already asking

Photos are judged on coverage, not volume. You want the exterior shot from the direction a driver approaches, the signage, the entrance, the parking situation, the reception area, the team, and the work itself. Replace the seasonal shots twice a year so the profile does not show a snowbank in August. Upload at a sensible resolution rather than at phone-camera maximum, and skip the geotagging rituals you will read about in forums; accuracy and recency matter more.

Posts are short-lived by design. Treat them as a monthly batch: one offer, one event or seasonal note, one update about something you actually did. They are most useful for time-sensitive facts, holiday hours, a new service, a temporary closure for renovations, rather than as a blogging channel.

The Q&A section is the part people forget, and it is open to anyone: a stranger can post a question, and a stranger can answer it, including a competitor with an opinion. Seed it yourself: post the questions your front desk answers every week from a personal signed-in account, then answer each one from the business account. Set a reminder to check for new questions weekly, because an unanswered question can sit at the top of the panel looking like neglect.

Build a reviews process you can actually sustain

Google says review count and rating feed local ranking, and a recent, well-answered set of reviews is what a person reads before calling. The only way to keep volume, recency and replies healthy at once is to make asking part of an existing routine rather than a quarterly push.

1. Pick the moment of relief: the invoice being paid, the handover, the follow-up call where the customer says it went well.
2. Generate the short review link from your profile and put it in one place your team can reach in two taps: an email signature, a text template, a card.
3. Ask in person or by name, once, and never offer a discount or gift in exchange. Incentivised and gated reviews breach the platform rules and put the whole profile at risk.
4. Reply to every review within a couple of business days. For positive ones, name the specific service so the reply carries meaning.
5. For a negative review, acknowledge the experience, correct any factual error calmly, and move the conversation to a phone number or email. Never confirm in public that someone is a client or reference anything from their file.

A steady handful of reviews each month with thoughtful replies reads better to a human than a sudden burst after a long silence, and it looks less suspicious to the platform.

Track calls, directions and clicks so the profile can be measured

Profile activity is invisible in your analytics until you tag it. Add UTM parameters to the website link and the appointment link on the profile before you do anything else, then agree on which numbers you will report on each month. If you use a call tracking number, put it in the primary phone field and keep your real published number in the additional phone field, so the number on your website and in your other listings still appears on the profile and your name, address and phone details stay consistent.

Once the tagging is in place you can compare the profile against your other channels honestly, which is where analytics and CRO work starts paying for itself.

Managing several locations, and the edits that trigger suspensions

For multi-location businesses, move to a location group and manage entries through bulk upload with a store code for each site. Every location needs a unique landing page on your website with its own address, hours and phone number, not a shared contact page with a dropdown. Give each location its own photos too; the same stock interior copied across every profile is obvious to customers. If you run franchises or a branch network, the governance question matters as much as the tactics: decide who can edit what, and make sure the head office holds ownership of the account rather than a former manager's personal login. That is the same principle we apply to franchise and multi-location work generally.

Suspensions usually trace back to a short list of causes:

• Keywords stuffed into the business name. The name field must match the name on your signage and paperwork, nothing more.
• An address that is a mailbox, a coworking desk or a virtual office with no staffed presence during stated hours.
• A service-area business displaying a street address instead of hiding it and setting a service area.
• Many edits made at once, especially name, address, category and phone changes in a single session. Space significant changes out.
• A profile that contradicts the website: different phone number, different hours, services that appear nowhere on the site.
• Practitioner listings created for staff who are not public-facing practitioners, or duplicate listings for the same address.

Reinstatement is slow and the appeal process gives you little to work with, so prevention is far cheaper than recovery. Before you make a batch of changes, screenshot the current profile so you have a record of what it looked like.

How OlDevs helps

OlDevs has been building and marketing for Canadian businesses from Vancouver since 2014, and local visibility work sits inside our performance marketing practice rather than off to one side. We audit the profile and the website together, because a profile can only be as accurate as the pages behind it: location pages, service pages, schema markup, hours that come from one source rather than three. You get one accountable team, a working demo every week, and full ownership of every account, page and asset we touch, including the profile itself. If you are running one location or a network of them, tell us what you are working with and we will tell you what we would change first. Request a quote and we will reply within one business day.