Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is the free listing that powers your business’s presence in Google Search and Google Maps. It is the single most important asset in local SEO. Whitespark’s 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors survey attributes around 32% of local pack ranking weight to profile signals, ahead of on-page signals at 15% and links at 8%.¹ That survey polls around fifty practitioners, so read it as expert consensus rather than measurement, but the ordering matches what Google says about its own eligibility rules: without a claimed and verified profile there is no local pack presence to optimise.²

What does Google Business Profile control?

When someone searches for your business by name, your GBP listing is what appears in the knowledge panel on the right side of the desktop SERP. When someone searches for a category or service near them, your GBP listing competes for one of the three spots in the local pack.

The information on that listing (category, description, photos, reviews, posts) is managed through Google Business Profile. Google has no other equivalent input from you. If the listing is incomplete, inaccurate, or inactive, it performs accordingly.

The profile now also feeds Google’s AI answer layer, which raises the cost of leaving it stale. Ask Maps, the Gemini-powered conversational layer over Maps announced in March 2026, works from Maps data covering “over 300 million places, including reviews from our community of more than 500 million contributors”.³ Google’s Grounding with Google Maps, generally available since September 2025, exposes the same substrate to third-party applications, including “daily-updated” details such as current hours and whether a business is temporarily closed.⁴ Your profile record, not your website, is the primary representation of your business inside Google’s AI surfaces.

Note that this covers Google’s systems. Other assistants source local data differently and appear less reliable on business details: SOCi’s 2026 index found profile information “only about 68% accurate on ChatGPT and Perplexity, compared with 100% accuracy on Gemini, which is grounded in Google Maps”.⁵

How do you set up your Google Business Profile?

If your business doesn’t already have a GBP listing:

1. Go to business.google.com and sign in with a Google account
2. Search for your business to confirm it doesn’t already exist (many are auto-generated by Google from web data)
3. Enter your business name, category, and address or service area
4. Verify your listing. Google states that “verification methods are automatically determined by Google and can’t be changed”, and that the options depend on “your business type, public info, region or opening hours”.⁶ The documented methods are video recording, live video call, phone or SMS, email, and postcard. Video recording is the one practitioners report most often, but Google does not describe any method as recommended or default, so plan for whichever you are offered rather than expecting a particular one.

If a listing already exists but is unclaimed, claim it through the same process and verify ownership.

What should you optimise on your Google Business Profile?

Business name

Use your exact trading name, nothing more. Google’s guidance is that your name “should reflect your business’s real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers”, and that “including unnecessary information in your business name isn’t permitted, and could result in the suspension of your Business Profile”.⁷ Marketing taglines, store codes, service descriptions and locations are all listed as not permitted.

Two things make this awkward, and it’s better to state them than to pretend otherwise. Keywords in the business title rank third of 186 factors in the practitioner survey, so the tactic is widely believed to work,¹ and enforcement is inconsistent enough that competitors who do it often go unpunished for long periods. That does not make it advisable: suspension removes you from local results entirely, and reinstatement is slow.

The compliant route to the same benefit is a genuine name change. If you legally trade as, or register a business name containing, a service or location term, that name is your real-world name and belongs in the field. What is not permitted is appending terms to a name you don’t actually use.

Primary category

The primary category is the most significant optimisation lever in your GBP listing. Google uses it to determine which searches your listing is eligible to appear for. Choose the most specific category that accurately describes your core business. If you are a solicitor specialising in family law, “Family Law Attorney” will outperform “Lawyer”.

Secondary categories can be added for additional services but should remain accurate; the survey ranks additional categories eighth of 186.¹ Over-categorisation reduces relevance rather than increasing it.

Opening hours

Hours are usually treated as a housekeeping detail. In the practitioner survey they are not: “business is open at time of search” ranks fifth of 186 local pack factors.¹ That has two practical consequences. Hours must be accurate, including holiday and seasonal variations, or you lose visibility during the periods you are actually trading. And if your trading hours genuinely extend beyond what your profile claims, correcting them is one of the cheapest available gains.

Address visibility and map pin

Two further factors that rarely make optimisation checklists rank in the survey’s top ten: “address is showing on the profile rather than hidden as a service-area business” at seventh, and correct map pin placement at tenth.¹

This creates a real decision for service-area businesses rather than a simple instruction. Google requires that if you don’t serve customers at your address you clear it, and specifically that “if you’re a plumber and run your business from your residential address, clear the address from your Business Profile”.⁷ Follow that rule, but go in knowing the trade-off: hiding the address is associated with weaker pack performance in practitioner assessments. A business with a genuine customer-facing premises should show it. A business without one should not fabricate one, since address accuracy is verified and misrepresentation risks suspension.

Check the pin as a separate step from the address. A geocoded pin can land behind a building, on the wrong side of a road, or on a neighbouring unit, and it is corrected by dragging it in the profile editor.

Business description

Up to 750 characters. Write a clear, natural description of what your business does, who it serves, and what distinguishes it. Set expectations correctly, though: keywords in the profile description rank 170th of 186 factors in the survey.¹ Write it for the person reading your listing, not as a ranking lever.

Service areas and address

Businesses that serve customers at the customer’s location (tradespeople, delivery services, consultants) should set a service area rather than (or in addition to) a physical address. For businesses with a physical premises that customers visit, a verified address is required to appear in local pack results.

Photos

Photos are what most people actually judge a listing on, and a profile without them looks abandoned. Upload:

• Logo (for brand recognition in the knowledge panel)
• Cover photo (the primary image displayed)
• Interior and exterior photos
• Team photos (contributes to trust signals)
• Product or work photos (relevant for tradespeople, restaurants, retail)

Keep photos current. Google may also auto-populate photos from Google Maps contributors. Monitor these and flag any that misrepresent the business.

Services and products

Use the Services section to list specific offerings with descriptions. For service businesses, this is an opportunity to appear for more specific queries beyond your primary category. A plumber who lists “boiler installation”, “leak repair”, and “bathroom fitting” as services gives Google more signals to match the listing against relevant local queries.

Worth distinguishing Google’s predefined services, which it suggests based on your category, from free-text custom ones. Predefined services rate considerably higher in the practitioner survey than the Posts and description fields most checklists emphasise.¹ Add every predefined service that genuinely applies before writing custom ones.

Attributes are the other commonly skipped field: accessibility, payment methods, amenities, and the identity attributes some searchers filter on. They are quick to complete and some of them surface as filters in Maps.

Reviews: the most significant ongoing activity

Google confirms two review signals: it states that prominence is based partly on “how many reviews you have”, and that “more reviews and positive ratings can help your business’s local ranking”.⁸ That is volume and rating.

Beyond those two, the commonly cited signals are practitioner inference rather than Google statements:

• Volume (Google-confirmed). More reviews, all else equal, helps. Steady accumulation rates higher in the survey than bursts.¹
• Rating (Google-confirmed). High numerical ratings rank sixth of 186 factors.¹
• Recency (survey evidence, ranked eleventh).¹
• Owner responses (survey evidence, and weaker than usually claimed: presence of responses ranks 121st, keywords in responses 181st).¹ Respond because prospective customers read the exchange, not for ranking.

Generating reviews should be an active, systematic process, and it must be done without gating. Google’s policy prohibits merchants from “selectively solicit[ing] positive reviews from customers”, from offering incentives, and from setting staff review quotas or scripting review content.⁹ UK law treats “encouraging just those who are satisfied to leave reviews” as cherry-picking under the DMCC Act.¹⁰ Ask every customer, and see reviews and ratings strategy for the detail.

Responding to negative reviews professionally and promptly mitigates their impact on both prospective customers and ranking signals. A thoughtful response to a 1-star review often matters more to future customers than the review itself.

Google Posts

GBP Posts allow you to publish updates (offers, events, news, new services) directly to your listing. They appear in the knowledge panel for branded searches and can appear in local pack results.

Update posts remain visible for six months before being archived. Event posts and Offer posts expire on their set end date.

Set expectations honestly here, because Posts are heavily promoted in local SEO advice and rate poorly as a ranking lever: posting frequency ranks 149th of 186 factors in the practitioner survey, keywords in Posts 160th, and quantity of Posts 169th.¹ Two to four posts per month is a reasonable target for keeping a listing looking active and communicating offers to people already viewing it. Treat it as a communication channel, not as a route to ranking, and don’t let it displace hours accuracy, categories, services or reviews.

What happened to Google Q&A?

Questions and answers on the profile were, for years, a standard optimisation tactic: owners seeded their own questions and answered them. That advice is out of date. Google discontinued the My Business Q&A API on 3 November 2025, stating it was “in the process of updating the Q&A functionality and user experience”, and after that date “you can no longer read or post questions and answers using the API”.¹¹

The practitioner surveys still carry Q&A factors, which tells you the field has not fully caught up. If you are working from an older guide or an agency checklist that includes owner-seeded Q&A, verify what the interface currently offers before budgeting time for it.

Common GBP mistakes

Mistake	Why it matters
Keyword-stuffed business name	Guidelines violation, risks suspension
Wrong or overly broad primary category	Reduces relevance matching
Incomplete address or service area	Limits pack eligibility
No response to reviews	Negative engagement signal
Outdated hours	Misleads users, and “open at time of search” is a top-five factor in practitioner surveys
Hiding the address when you have a genuine customer-facing premises	Associated with weaker pack performance
Misplaced map pin	Wrong location shown; a top-ten factor in practitioner surveys
Relying on Posts as a ranking tactic	Ranks near the bottom of practitioner factor lists
Duplicate listings	Dilutes signals; confuses Google’s entity understanding

LocalBusiness schema

LocalBusiness structured data is JSON-LD markup added to your website’s HTML. It is separate from your GBP listing but reinforces the same entity signals Google uses for local ranking and knowledge panel display. Where GBP tells Google about your business through the listing interface, schema markup tells it through the page itself.

Add a JSON-LD block to your homepage or, for multi-location businesses, each location’s dedicated page:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Plumber",
  "name": "Smith Plumbers",
  "url": "https://smithplumbers.co.uk",
  "telephone": "+44-20-1234-5678",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "12 Example Street",
    "addressLocality": "London",
    "postalCode": "EC1A 1BB",
    "addressCountry": "GB"
  },
  "geo": {
    "@type": "GeoCoordinates",
    "latitude": 51.517200,
    "longitude": -0.106200
  },
  "openingHoursSpecification": [
    {
      "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
      "dayOfWeek": ["Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday","Friday"],
      "opens": "08:00",
      "closes": "18:00"
    }
  ]
}

Use the most specific @type available. Schema.org provides hundreds of LocalBusiness subtypes: Restaurant, Plumber, DentalClinic, LegalService, Florist. A specific subtype gives Google stronger classification signals than the generic LocalBusiness. If no subtype fits, LocalBusiness is correct.

Only name and address are actually required; geo and openingHoursSpecification are recommended and are the two most commonly missing.¹² Note that Google specifies a precision floor for coordinates: “the precision must be at least 5 decimal places”.¹² Validate with Google’s Rich Results Test, which checks for errors but will not flag absent recommended properties, so cross-reference against the Google LocalBusiness documentation for the full property list. There is more detail in local schema markup.

Monitoring and maintenance

GBP listings require ongoing attention. They are not set-and-forget assets. Third parties can suggest edits, and Google sometimes applies changes from user suggestions or its own data. The scale is not trivial: Google reported blocking 79 million inaccurate or unverified profile edits during 2025, alongside removing over 13 million fake Business Profiles.¹³

Google has improved the owner-side controls here. As of April 2026 it began “rolling out proactive email alerts so verified and active owners have a way to easily review important edits to their Business Profiles before they go live”.¹³ That shifts the job from catching bad edits after the fact to reviewing them in advance, but it depends on the profile being verified and actively managed, and on the alert emails reaching someone who acts on them.

Use the Performance tab in your GBP dashboard to track how users find and interact with your listing: search queries, views, direction requests, calls, and website clicks. This data does not appear in Google Search Console and provides unique visibility into local search performance.

Footnotes

1. Local Search Ranking Factors 2026 — Whitespark ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²

2. Business eligibility and ownership guidelines — Google Business Profile Help ↩

3. Ask Maps and immersive navigation — Google ↩

4. Your AI is now a local expert: Grounding with Google Maps is now GA — Google Developers Blog ↩

5. AI assistants recommend far fewer local businesses than Google — Search Engine Land ↩

6. Verify your Business Profile — Google Business Profile Help ↩

7. Guidelines for representing your business on Google — Google Business Profile Help ↩ ↩²

8. Tips to improve your local ranking on Google — Google Business Profile Help ↩

9. Prohibited and restricted content — Google Maps user contributed content policy ↩

10. Fake reviews: guidance on the prohibition under paragraph 13 of Schedule 20 to the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (CMA208) — Competition and Markets Authority ↩

11. My Business Q&A API change log — Google ↩

12. Local business (LocalBusiness) structured data — Google Search Central ↩ ↩²

13. New ways we’re protecting businesses on Maps — Google ↩ ↩²