Google Business Profile: the guide

When a customer searches your trade followed by your town, the first thing shown is not a website: it is the map, with three business profiles. Your site, if all goes well, comes below.

That is why a badly configured profile costs more than an imperfect website — and also why it can be fixed in an hour, for free.

What is a business profile for?

Three things, and only one of them is obvious.

Existing on the map. With no profile you do not appear in the local results block, whatever your site does. That block captures most "trade + town" searches on mobile, before anyone scrolls down to the links.

Answering practical questions. Opening hours, phone, directions, service area. A customer who cannot find those in three seconds calls the next name.

Carrying your reviews. It is the one surface where your reputation appears next to your name whether you chose it or not.

Why does my business not show on Google?

Four causes, in the order to check them.

You have no profile. The simplest case, and a common one for businesses without a shopfront — many assume a profile requires premises. It does not, and we come back to that below.

Your profile is not verified. Created but never confirmed through the postcard, call or video Google asks for. It exists for you, not for anyone else.

Your primary category is wrong. You do appear, but never on the searches that matter. This is the most expensive cause and the most invisible: everything looks fine.

You are searching for your own name. Many owners test their trading name, which nobody else types. Appearing on your own name proves nothing.

How to choose the primary category, and why it decides everything

This is the most important setting on the profile, and the least known. The primary category determines which searches your profile is eligible for. Not your description, not your photos, not how many words you put in them.

A joinery listed as "furniture shop" will not come up for "joiner". It may be complete, well rated, with fine photographs. It simply is not running in the right race.

Google states the rule itself, and it is more useful than it looks:

"Select as few categories as possible to describe your primary activity. Ask yourself what your establishment IS rather than what it OFFERS."

Three practical consequences. The primary category describes what you are — the trade, not the service. Secondary ones, up to nine, describe what you also do, with less weight. And piling on unrelated categories dilutes rather than widens: Google explicitly forbids using categories "solely to define keywords".

The simple test: run the search you want to appear on, look at the three profiles in the local block, and compare their category with yours.

Do you have to show your address when you have no premises?

No — and this is the question that blocks the most profile creations.

If you do not receive customers at your address, set the profile up as a service area business: the address is hidden, and you declare service areas instead. You stay eligible for the local block without exposing your home.

Two limits worth knowing. Google caps how many areas you can declare, so coherent départements or a region beat a scatter of towns. And above all, declaring an area does not make you strong in it: actual proximity remains a local ranking factor. A business in the Nièvre declaring Paris will not show up in Paris.

What about reviews, and should you reply?

Reply, yes, and to all of them — including the good ones.

The reply rate is visible to any visitor, and a run of unanswered reviews reads as indifference. It is also one of the few signals you control entirely.

On a negative review, the reply is not addressed to its author but to the dozens of people who will read it afterwards. Factual, short, no argument: that is what will be judged, not the complaint.

And never buy reviews. Beyond the risk of losing the profile, an unnaturally smooth rating pattern is recognisable, and it destroys precisely what it claims to build.

Why your profile and your site must say the same thing

Name, address, phone: all three must be identical on the profile, on the site and everywhere else. A phone number differing by one digit, a company name abbreviated on one side and spelled out on the other, and search engines stop being certain it is the same business.

That consistency now reaches beyond local search. Generative engines tie a mention to an entity through those same signals: when they fail to reconcile, your company becomes two blurred businesses rather than one identified.

The check takes five minutes: open the profile and the site side by side, and compare character by character.

Where should you start?

With the primary category: it is the only setting that changes what you are eligible for, and it takes thirty seconds to correct.

Then with completeness — hours, service areas, services, recent photos. Google itself flags what is missing, and that list beats any general advice.

Finally with consistency against your site.

None of those three actions costs a penny, and together they weigh more, for a local clientele, than anything you could buy in advertising. That is precisely why the business profile has become a section of the diagnosis I produce: on a local business, ignoring it would mean auditing the wrong asset.