For most local businesses the Google listing gets more visits than the website. It is also the thing most owners set up once and never touch again. Here is what to fill in, what to keep doing, and what to leave alone.
Search for a plumber, a dentist or a place for lunch on your phone and the first thing you see is not a website. It is a map with three businesses pinned to it, each with a star rating, opening hours and a call button. That block is built entirely from Google Business Profiles, the free listing Google gives every business. For a small business, the profile is very often the first, and sometimes the only, place a new customer meets you.
Which is why it is strange how little attention it gets. The website was paid for, so it gets looked at. The profile was free, so it was set up in an afternoon three years ago and has not been opened since. This guide is the correction: what to fill in, what to keep doing every week, and what to do about reviews, in that order.
Google is unusually open about this one. Its own help documentation for local ranking lists three factors: relevance (how well the listing matches what was searched), distance (how far the business is from the searcher, or from the place they named), and prominence (how well known the business is, measured through reviews, links, articles and how it ranks in ordinary web search).
Distance you cannot change without moving. Relevance and prominence you can. Relevance is mostly a question of filling in the profile completely and accurately. Prominence is mostly a question of reviews and of having a website and a wider presence that Google can connect to the listing. Almost everything below is one of those two levers.
Google is trying to answer a question: "which of these businesses is really the best match for this person, right now?" Every field you fill in and every review you earn is evidence. Thin profiles do not lose because Google dislikes them. They lose because there is nothing to go on.
A profile has dozens of fields, and they are not equal. These are the ones worth getting right first, in roughly the order they matter.
The single most important field. It tells Google which searches you belong in at all. Be specific and honest: "Italian restaurant", not "Restaurant"; "Emergency plumber" only if you actually answer at 3 a.m. Add secondary categories for real other things you do, and resist adding ones you do not.
Not "Marta's Salon, Best Hair Colour in Valencia". Google's guidelines forbid stuffing keywords into the name, and listings that do it get reported by competitors and suspended. The name is the name. The keywords go in the fields built for them.
List each thing you do as its own service with a short description and, where you can, a price or a from-price. This is where relevance gets built: someone searching for "boiler repair" matches a listing that says boiler repair, not one that says "all plumbing work".
Including holidays, including the Tuesday you close early. A customer who drives to a closed door because the profile said open leaves a one-star review that outlives the mistake by years. Set special hours ahead of every public holiday; it takes a minute.
You get 750 characters. Use the first two sentences to say what you do, for whom, and where, in the words a customer would use. Then what makes you the sensible choice. No lists of neighbourhoods, no capital letters, no "best".
The front of the building (so people recognise it), the inside, the team, the work. Recent, well lit, taken on a phone is fine. Replace the ones from the opening week. Photos are one of the first things a searcher looks at and one of the first things that goes stale.
The phone number that is actually answered. The website that actually loads on a phone. If you take bookings, a link straight to the booking page, not the homepage. Every step you remove between the listing and the action is a customer you do not lose on the way.
Wheelchair access, outdoor seating, women-owned, appointment required, accepts cards. Small fields, but they answer the filters people apply and the questions AI assistants get asked. Tick the true ones.
If you do nothing else from this article, build a way of asking for reviews that does not depend on remembering. Reviews feed prominence directly. They are also what a person actually reads before choosing, and increasingly what an AI assistant summarises when someone asks it to recommend a place.
Three things matter more than the star average. Recency: a listing whose last review is from 2024 looks closed. Volume over time: a steady trickle beats a burst, and a burst of twenty in one week looks bought. Replies: an owner who answers, including the bad ones, calmly and specifically, is visibly a business that is paying attention.
Inside the profile dashboard there is a short link that opens the review box directly. Save it. Put it on the receipt, on a small card at the till, in the confirmation email, and as a QR code where people wait.
Not at the invoice. When the job is finished and the customer says "that's great, thank you", that is the moment. A day later, at most two, is still fine. A month later is a favour they have forgotten they owe.
Any booking or invoicing tool can send a short message a day after the job with the link in it. Set it up once and stop relying on remembering. This is the single highest-value automation most local businesses can build; we explain how to pick it in which jobs to automate first.
Two lines for a good one, with something specific from the visit so it does not read as a template. For a bad one: thank them, state the one fact that matters, offer to fix it offline. Never argue, never mention their name in a way that identifies them if they did not, and never reply angry on the same day.
Google removes reviews it thinks are fake and can suspend the listing that received them. The people who buy reviews always think they are the ones who will not get caught. Slow and real wins, and it also happens to be the only version that produces customers.
A profile is a living record, and Google notices when it is alive. The whole routine fits in a calendar reminder on Monday morning.
It is tempting to conclude that if the listing gets the tap, the website is optional. It is the opposite. Google connects the listing to the site, and the site is a large part of what it means by prominence: does this business exist beyond the listing, does it say the same things, do others link to it. A profile pointing at a slow page from 2019, or at nothing, is a profile with a weak foundation.
The practical rule is consistency. Same name, same address, same phone number, same categories of service, on the listing, on the site and everywhere else you appear. Then make the site do the one job the listing cannot: explain, in enough depth, why someone should choose you, with a way to book or call on every page. That is the job a small business website is for, and the reason the two together outperform either alone. If you want to understand where all of this is heading as AI assistants start answering the search directly, read getting found when AI answers first.
Send us the name of your business and we will look at the profile and the site together and tell you the three things that would move it most. No report, no invoice, a short honest email.
Ask for a lookYes, completely. Creating, verifying and managing the profile costs nothing, and Google does not sell better placement in the map results. Anyone offering to "register you with Google" for a fee is reselling a free form, and the ones who call about it unprompted are usually not worth talking to.
Corrections to categories, hours and services usually show within days. Movement in the map ranking is slower, because prominence is built from reviews and signals that accumulate over weeks and months. Give a properly completed profile eight to twelve weeks of the weekly routine before judging it.
You can be found without one, but you rank better and convert better with one. Google uses the site as part of prominence, and customers use it to decide once the listing has caught their eye. A simple, fast, mobile-first site that matches the listing is enough; you can see what that costs on our pricing page.
Only if it breaks Google's policies, for example spam, a review of the wrong business, or content that is off-topic or abusive. You can flag it from the dashboard and Google decides. An honest negative review from a real customer stays; the best response is a calm, specific public reply, which future customers read more carefully than the review itself.
When a customer searches nearby and books the competitor with a faster site and instant replies, it isn't because they were better. It's because they were easier to find and faster to answer. That's fixable, and it starts with a 15-minute chat that costs nothing.