How to Optimise Your Google Business Profile, Field by Field

Most Google Business Profiles I audit are not short of effort. They are short of accuracy.

The owner has uploaded photos, written a description and posted updates.

But the primary category is wrong, the service area covers half the country, and the website link goes to the homepage.

This guide goes through the profile field by field, in the order that matters.

You'll get what to set, what Google's rules allow, and what I check first when a profile underperforms.

How Google ranks Business Profiles

Before touching any field, it helps to know what Google is weighing.

According to Google's own explanation of local ranking, local results are based mainly on three things:

• Relevance. How well your profile matches what someone searched for.
• Distance. How far your business is from the searcher, or from the location in the query.
• Prominence. How well known your business is, including how many sites link to you and how many reviews you have.

The same page is clear on one point: there is no way to pay for a better local ranking.

You cannot change distance.

Every step below works on relevance or prominence.

Before you start

Make sure you have:

• Owner access to the profile, not just manager access, for changes like the name
• A verified profile. Unverified profiles are less likely to appear in results.
• Your real-world details: legal and trading name, exact address, opening hours, main phone line
• A list of the services you want to be found for, ranked by value

One warning: Google reviews edits before publishing them, and changing the name or address can trigger re-verification.

Make big changes deliberately, one at a time.

Step 1: Use your real business name

Your profile name should match the name on your signage, website and paperwork. Nothing more.

Google's guidelines for representing your business do not allow extra information in the name. That rules out:

• Keywords ("Smith & Co Emergency Plumber London")
• Taglines and marketing phrases
• Locations, unless they are part of your real branding
• Phone numbers, hours or website addresses

Breaking this rule can get your profile suspended.

If competitors stuff keywords into their names, you can suggest an edit to correct them.

But keep your own profile clean. A suspended profile loses all its visibility at once.

Step 2: Choose your primary category against who ranks

This is the field that moves rankings most often in my work.

Google lets you pick one primary category and up to nine more.

Its guidelines say to use as few as possible, to choose ones that describe what your business is, and not to use categories as keywords.

Here's how I choose:

1. Search your main service in your area, for example "roofer near me".
2. Note the primary category of each business in the map pack. Third-party browser extensions can show it, or you can check how each listing describes itself under its name.
3. If most of them use a more specific category than you, test switching to it.

The common mistake is a category that is too broad.

A specialist listed under a general category often loses to competitors who picked the specific one. I see this constantly in local SEO for home services, where trades sit under one catch-all category.

Add secondary categories only for services you genuinely offer.

Every extra category is a claim about your business.

Pro tip: Make one category change at a time and track map pack positions for a few weeks. If you change three fields at once, you will not know which one made the difference.

Step 3: Set your address or service area honestly

Your answer depends on one question: do customers come to you, or do you go to them?

Google's guidelines say service-area businesses should hide their address.

They also say a service area should not extend farther than about two hours' drive from your base, with some exceptions.

Do not use a P.O. box or a virtual office. Google does not allow either.

I worked with a UK mobile therapy service whose therapists visit clients at home within a set radius. Getting this setup right was part of the groundwork, which you can read about in the mobile massage case study.

Step 4: Add a local phone number and a tracked website link

Phone. Google asks for a local number rather than a central call centre line wherever possible.

The number must be under your direct control, and premium-rate numbers are not allowed. You can add up to two more numbers alongside the primary one.

Website. Link to the page that best represents that location, not automatically to your homepage.

For a single-location business, the homepage may be right.

For a business with several branches, link each profile to its own location page. Mark that page up with LocalBusiness structured data that matches the profile; my schema markup generator builds the code.

Then add UTM parameters to the link, so visits from your profile show up separately in analytics:

https://example.com/manchester/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gbp

Without this, profile clicks blend into general organic traffic.

If your GA4 setup does not track calls and form submissions yet, my guide to setting up key events in GA4 covers it.

Step 5: Fill in hours, special hours and attributes

Hours. List your regular customer-facing hours.

Businesses that operate only by appointment should not list hours, according to Google's guidelines.

Special hours. Set them ahead of bank holidays and closures.

Wrong hours lead to annoyed customers and bad reviews.

Attributes. These are short facts about your business, such as accessibility features or payment options.

You can set the factual ones yourself. Others depend on customer feedback.

Fill in every attribute that is true.

Each one gives Google, and your customers, another detail to match against.

Google's own ranking page says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up in local results. These fields are where "complete" happens.

Step 6: Add your services and write the description

Services. For many service categories, you can list individual services with a short description of each.

Add every service you want to be found for, in plain language that matches how customers describe the job. If you are not sure what words they use, keyword research for a service business will tell you.

Description. You get 750 characters.

The field guide for editing your profile says no URLs or HTML, and the main guidelines rule out promotions, prices and sales offers.

What works in the description:

• What you do and who you do it for, in the first sentence
• The areas you cover, written naturally
• What makes you different: experience, specialism, accreditations
• How customers usually get started with you

Write it for a person deciding whether to call.

Keyword lists read badly and add nothing.

Step 7: Upload real photos and keep adding them

Photos are one of the things Google itself recommends adding, to show customers what you offer.

Prioritise:

• The outside of your premises, so people recognise it when they arrive
• Your team at work, in real settings
• Finished jobs or products, with before and after shots where they make sense
• Your vehicles if you visit customers

Skip stock images. They tell customers nothing about you.

Add new photos regularly, not in one burst.

A profile with recent photos of real work looks like a business that is open and busy.

Step 8: Build a steady review routine and reply to every review

Reviews feed prominence directly.

Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking, and that replying shows customers you value their feedback.

Set up a routine rather than a campaign:

1. Ask every customer, at the moment they are happiest, usually right after the job is done.
2. Make it easy. Send the direct review link by text or email.
3. Never gate or incentivise. Asking only happy customers, or offering a discount for a review, breaks platform rules.
4. Reply to every review, positive and negative, within a few days.

In regulated sectors, replies need extra care.

A healthcare provider confirming that someone was a patient can breach confidentiality, which is why I treat review handling differently for healthcare local SEO.

My full process is in my guide on how to get more Google reviews.

Common Google Business Profile mistakes

The problems I find most often, roughly in order:

• A primary category that is too broad or not used by anyone in the map pack
• Keywords in the business name, which risks suspension
• A service area far larger than the business really covers
• Details that differ from the website and directories, such as an old phone number
• No review routine, so reviews arrive in bursts and then stop
• The website link going to the homepage when a better page exists

That fourth point matters beyond the profile.

Your name, address and phone number should match everywhere they appear online. I cover how that works in my explainer on what local citations are, and finding the right directories in my guide to directory listing opportunities.

Keep the profile accurate, then build around it

Start with Steps 1 to 3 this week: name, primary category and location settings.

Those three decide whether the rest of your work counts.

Then work through the remaining fields, set up a review routine and check the profile monthly for edits you did not make.

A profile is only one part of local visibility.

Location pages, citations and reviews on other platforms all feed the same picture, and that is the wider job my local SEO service covers. If you want to see how the pieces fit together for a business like yours, the local SEO page walks through how I run it.