Google Business Profile

What does a Google Business Profile do for a local business?

When someone searches "plumber near me" or "dentist open Saturday", the businesses Google shows on the map come from Business Profiles. Your profile is where a customer sees your rating, reads a few reviews, checks your hours, and taps to call. For a lot of local jobs, that tap happens before anyone visits your website.

Google ranks these listings on three things it names in its own help pages: relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well your profile matches the search. Distance is how far you are from the person searching. Prominence is how well known you are, which includes your review count, your rating and links to your business from around the web. Google also says there is no way to pay for a better local ranking.

Of the three, the profile itself mostly moves relevance. A complete profile with the right category, real hours and an accurate service area gives Google more to match against.

How do you set it up right?

Go to business.google.com/add, or search for your business on Google Maps and pick "Claim this business" if a listing already exists. Google then asks you to verify, and until you do, your edits don't count for much.

Use your real business name exactly as it appears on your truck, sign and invoices. Google's guidelines ban adding keywords, taglines or city names to the name, so "Rivera Plumbing" is fine and "Rivera Plumbing Best Emergency Plumber Dallas" can get the profile suspended.

Pick one primary category that finishes the sentence "This business is a...", like "Plumber" or "Cosmetic dentist". Add a few more only if they describe the business as a whole, not every service you sell.

• Hours, including holiday hours, so nobody drives over to a locked door.
• Services with plain descriptions, written the way customers ask for them.
• Real photos of your crew, your work and your shop or office.
• A service area if you go to the customer (up to 20 areas).

What if you work out of your truck?

Most plumbers, HVAC techs, roofers and cleaners are what Google calls a service-area business: you go to the customer instead of the customer coming to you. Google's rule is simple. If you don't serve customers at your address, remove the address from the profile and set a service area instead.

You can list up to 20 service areas by city or ZIP code, and Google's guidelines say the whole area shouldn't stretch much past about two hours of driving from your base. A hybrid business, like a tire shop that also does mobile installs, keeps the address and adds a service area.

Hiding your address doesn't hide you from local searches. Google still knows where you're based, and distance still counts, so a roofer in Plano won't usually show on the map for someone searching in Fort Worth just because Fort Worth is in the service area list.

Common mistakes

• Stuffing keywords or a city into the business name, which breaks Google's guidelines and can get the profile suspended.
• Picking a dozen categories for every service instead of one accurate primary category and a few true extras.
• Showing a home address as a storefront when customers never visit it.