· 7 min read · Jason Youngjin Koh
Google Business Profile, done right
Most guides list thirty things to fix on a Google Business Profile. Five of them change anything. Here they are, plus the one popular tactic that risks losing the profile altogether.
Five things move the needle on a Google Business Profile: your primary category, your reviews, whether your address is set up correctly for how you actually trade, whether the website field holds your exact canonical URL, and whether your hours and photos are true. Everything else on the checklist is housekeeping.
5
Settings on a Google Business Profile worth an owner's attention. The other twenty five are tidy rather than useful.
Primary category, which is the one that ranks you
Choose it wrong and no amount of description tweaking rescues you. Google describes local results as driven by relevance, distance and prominence, and your primary category is the strongest thing you control on the relevance side. It behaves like a filter. If a search maps to a category you have not claimed, you are largely out of the running.
Pick the category that describes what you are, not what you would like to sell. An Electrician who sets Solar Energy Contractor because solar is the growth plan will lose electrician searches, which is most of the demand. Add the aspirational one as a secondary category and leave the primary alone.
Two checks. Search the term you most want to win, in your suburb, and look at what the map pack winners have chosen. Then confirm yours is not something generic like Business Service, which matches almost nothing anyone types.
Reviews, in volume and in recency
Reviews are the most powerful thing on this list that you can influence directly, and Google says so in plain language in its own local ranking guidance: more reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking.
Recency matters alongside volume. Forty reviews with the newest one from 2023 reads as a business that has stopped, both to the algorithm and to the person deciding whether to call you. A steady trickle beats a burst. Twenty people asked over five months is worth more than twenty asked in a fortnight, which looks exactly like what it is.
The practical version: ask every satisfied customer at the moment the job is finished, and send the direct review link by text rather than explaining where to find it. Reply to all of them, including the poor ones, in a tone you would be happy to have read aloud. Every future customer who scrolls that far reads your replies.
Service area setup, if you do not have a shopfront
If you travel to customers and nobody comes to you, you can serve an area without publishing your home address. Google's guidance is that a business which does not serve customers at its location should not display an address. In the profile, edit the business location and switch off the option to show your address to customers, then declare the suburbs, councils or regions you cover.
You still verify against a real address. Australian small businesses often use the home address registered against the ABN for that, then hide it from public view. Hiding it is the path Google supports. It is also safer than the two common alternatives, publishing your house or renting a virtual office you never sit in, and the second of those gets profiles suspended.
Keep the service area honest and reasonably tight. A plumber based in Marrickville who claims all of New South Wales gains nothing, because distance is a separate ranking input and a vast service area does not shorten the distance to the searcher. Claim what you will genuinely drive to.
The website field: your exact canonical URL
Put in the precise URL your site actually resolves to, matching on https and on whether you use www. If your site loads at https://www.example.com.au and the profile points at http://example.com.au, every visitor is taking a redirect and Google is being handed two versions of the same entity to reconcile.
Type your domain into a browser, let it settle, then copy what sits in the address bar. That is the string to paste. Trailing slash and all. If you have multiple locations, point each profile at the relevant location page rather than sending all of them to the homepage.
The description does not rank you, and is still worth writing
Say it plainly: the business description does not drive local pack ranking. Owners spend hours polishing 750 characters expecting a movement that has never been demonstrated. Categories, reviews, proximity and your website do that work.
The description has a different and increasingly valuable job. It is one of the pieces of text an AI assistant reaches for when somebody asks it about your business. When a customer asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI answers who does emergency electrical work in Newtown, the summary they read back is assembled from whatever describes you plainly and consistently across the web, and your own description is the version you control.
So write it for a machine explaining you to a person. Say what you do, who you do it for, where you operate, and anything that qualifies or disqualifies a customer: licences, after hours availability, minimum job size, the suburbs you cover. Concrete beats warm. A sentence like we service strata and commercial sites across the Inner West with a licensed after hours team is quotable. A sentence about being passionate about quality is not.
Photos and hours, which mostly need to be true
Photos decide whether someone picks you once they have found you. A dozen real shots of your premises, van, team and finished work beat sixty stock images. Add a few every couple of months so the profile looks like a going concern.
Hours are the fastest way to lose a customer you already paid to attract. Wrong hours send someone to a closed door, and that person writes the review. Set your regular hours accurately, set special hours for Australia Day, Anzac Day, Easter and the Christmas shutdown, and remember public holidays differ by state, so a Victorian profile and a Queensland profile need different entries. If you take calls beyond your shopfront hours, use the hours fields for those service types rather than blurring the main ones.
What to ignore
Keyword stuffing the business name. It is the most popular tactic in local SEO and the one most likely to cost you the profile. Google requires the name on your profile to be the name you actually trade under, as it appears on your signage, invoices and website. Adding services, suburbs or slogans to it breaches that requirement.
Businesses do it because it can work for a while. It also gets profiles suspended, and a suspension takes your rankings, your reviews and your map presence off the board at once while you wait on an appeal. Competitors can and do report these. Trading a temporary lift against that outcome is a poor bet for a business that depends on the phone ringing.
| Setting | Does it move local ranking? | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Primary category | Yes, strongly | Match what you actually are, check against the map pack |
| Reviews, volume and recency | Yes | Ask every happy customer, steadily, and reply to all of them |
| Address or service area setup | Yes, through distance and eligibility | Hide the address if customers do not come to you, claim a realistic area |
| Website URL | Indirectly, and it affects every click | Paste the exact canonical URL, https and www matching your site |
| Hours and photos | Little directly, a lot for conversion | Keep them true, set state based public holiday hours |
| Business description | No | Write it for AI assistants and customers, and keep links out of it |
| Keywords in the business name | Sometimes, until suspension | Do not. Use your real trading name |
An hour of work, in order
- Check your primary category against the businesses winning the search you care about, and change it if it is generic or aspirational.
- Confirm the address setting matches how you trade, and hide it if customers never come to you.
- Paste the exact canonical URL of your site into the website field.
- Rewrite the description as a plain factual paragraph an assistant could quote, with no links in it.
- Set special hours for the next twelve months of public holidays in your state.
- Set up a review request that goes out by text the day a job finishes, and use it every time.
A profile in good order also makes every paid click cheaper, because the same person often checks your reviews before they call. More on how paid search and local visibility fit together
On its own the profile is a listing, and it either represents your business accurately or quietly costs you calls. Get those five settings right, keep the reviews coming, and the rest of the checklist can wait for a rainy afternoon.