A business profile is not filled in, it is kept up
Creating and verifying your Google profile is the beginning, not the end: completeness, photos, updates, the living profile beats the one filled in once and left there. A quick win from the SEO series.
The seventh part of the series explained how to claim and verify your Google Business Profile. This quick win starts where that part stopped: the profile exists, verified. What do you do next so that it pays off?
Completeness is not an administrative detail
The official local ranking guidance is explicit: complete and accurate information helps Google match the profile to the right searches, and complete profiles are served better. Concretely, every field left empty is a question left unanswered: opening hours, categories, service area, services, attributes, link to the website. The full pass takes an hour, once. The consistency rule laid down in the seventh part keeps applying to every field: the name, address and phone number are written here exactly as on the website and everywhere else.
One field deserves special mention: opening hours, including special hours for public holidays. It is the most consulted and most perishable piece of information, and a profile that sends a customer to a locked door is working against you.
Photos, because the profile is a shop window
Real photos of the workshop, the shop, the finished jobs, the team if they agree. No stock images: the person comparing three profiles wants to see whose place they are going to, and generic photos are recognised at first glance. A few honest, sharp photos, renewed when something changes, are enough; the official page on local ranking in fact lists photos among the ways to improve a profile.
The monthly update, the habit that sets you apart
The profile lets you publish short updates, like a miniature social network: a job completed, a new service, a summer closure. Few local businesses do it, and that is precisely the point: a profile whose last sign of life is three years old and a profile that posted last week do not tell the same story, to the customer or to the engine. One update a month, three sentences and a photo, is enough to stay in the second category.
The routine that fits in thirty minutes a month
Check the opening hours as public holidays approach. Publish an update. Reply to the reviews that came in, a habit whose weight the article on reviews details. Look at the questions asked on the profile, because you can answer them officially. That is all, and it is monthly: the business profile rewards consistency far more than one-off effort. That half hour has its natural place among the twelve months of dated maintenance tasks, with the site’s other monthly appointments.
Who writes these notes
This journal is kept by the workshop that designs and maintains the house’s websites. Everything described here, the Search Console, internal links, the business profile, is part of the work delivered with a site: if you would rather someone took care of it, that is precisely the trade.