The Google Business Profile: existing on the map
For a local clientele, the panel shown beside the results and on Maps counts as much as the site. Creating, verifying and keeping up your profile, following the official help. Beginners' SEO series, part seven.
Type the name of a shop, a practice or a tradesman: Google displays, next to the classic results, a panel with address, opening hours, reviews, directions. This panel, fed by the Google Business Profile, is often the first encounter between a local customer and a business, before the site itself. For anyone serving a local clientele, this project is worth as much as the site, and it is free.
Claim before you polish
First thing to know: the profile can exist without you. Google creates profiles from public sources, and anyone can suggest a business. So the first step is not to create, but to search: your business may already have a profile, which you then need to claim to take control of it. If it has none, you add it, with a Google account the business controls. Same principle as for Search Console: ownership of these accounts belongs to the business, never to a passing provider.
Verification, the unavoidable step
Editing your profile and replying to reviews requires proving the business really is yours: that is verification. Google itself chooses which methods are offered, depending on the type of business and the region: phone, e-mail, postal mail, or increasingly often a video recording showing the premises, the signage, the proof that you can open the door. You do not pick your method, and you should allow up to five business days of review after completing it, sometimes more. Plan for that delay: a profile is launched before you need it, not the week you need it.
The golden rule: consistency
Local search rests on a triplet professionals call NAP: name, address, phone. This triplet must be rigorously identical everywhere the business appears: the profile, the site, the commercial register, the directories. “Rue de la Gare 3” here and “3, rue de la Gare” there, an old phone number left in a directory: every variation forces the engines to guess whether it is the same business. Before creating the profile, fix the exact spelling of these three pieces of data, and hold to it everywhere, to the letter.
Then two disciplines that keep the profile alive: accuracy, opening hours first of all, because a profile that sends a customer to a locked door on a Saturday turns visibility into negative advertising; and reviews, which you answer, including the bad ones, in the tone you would want to receive.
What the profile does not replace
The profile catches the person searching for your name or your trade near them. It says little beyond that, and everything it displays belongs to Google’s ecosystem, not to you. The site remains the place where you elaborate, where you prove, where you convert, and the link to the site is in fact one of the profile’s most important fields. The two reinforce each other; neither excuses you from the other. And if the job feels heavy, you can ask the workshop to prepare your profile: keeping the name, address and phone triplet consistent is part of the work delivered with a site.
Next part: websites in several languages, and how to avoid sabotaging yourself while meaning well.
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.