How Can Google My Business Benefit Your Business?

Google My Business, now technically renamed Google Business Profile, is the single most underused piece of free marketing real estate in existence. It sits at the top of the search results, shows a map, shows your reviews, shows your opening hours, and most small businesses have filled it in once in 2018 and never looked at it since. Madness. Fixable, but madness.

What It Actually Is

When someone searches for "bakery Gosforth" or "plumber Heaton", Google shows a map with three local results above the organic listings. That block, known as the Local Pack, is powered entirely by Google Business Profiles. If you are in the pack, you get the bulk of the local traffic. If you are not, you are competing for scraps below it.

Your profile also shows when someone searches your business name directly, appearing on the right of the results with your photos, hours, reviews, posts and website link. It is effectively a second homepage. Most businesses treat it like a second afterthought.

The Benefits, Listed Bluntly

• Free visibility: On page one of Google, at the top, with a map pin. Unbeatable real estate.
• Local credibility: A well-populated profile looks trustworthy in a way an unclaimed one does not.
• Reviews: Arguably the most powerful social proof on the internet.
• Direct actions: Customers can call, message, get directions or visit your site in one tap.
• Insights: Free data on how people are finding you and what they do next.
• Posts and updates: A mini social feed that appears right in the search results.

The Bits Everyone Misses

Claiming your profile is step one. Most people stop there. The real benefits come from the bits people ignore:

• Categories: Pick a primary category that matches exactly what you do, then add every relevant secondary category. This alone can lift rankings.
• Services and products: Fill in every service or product with descriptions. Google uses these to match you to searches.
• Photos: Add them regularly. Profiles with recent photos outperform profiles with stale ones.
• Posts: Publish updates, offers and events. They keep the profile looking active.
• Q&A: Answer questions yourself before random members of the public get there first.
• Attributes: Wheelchair access, outdoor seating, free Wi-Fi. Fill them in. They influence visibility.

Reviews: The Big One

Reviews are a disproportionate ranking factor for local search. Number of reviews, recency of reviews, star average and whether you reply to them all feed into Google's decision about where to rank you. More importantly, they feed into whether a human actually picks you.

Ask every happy customer for a review. Make it easy. Send them a direct link. Reply to every review, good or bad, in your brand voice. A thoughtful reply to a bad review can win you more customers than the original negative review cost you.

Consistency, Consistency, Consistency

Your name, address and phone number should be identical across your Google Business Profile, your website, your Facebook, your directory listings and everywhere else you exist online. Differences confuse Google. Consistency reassures it. This is part of the wider off-page SEO picture, which we cover in our on-page versus off-page post.

Common Mistakes

The wrong category, the wrong address, missed hours over bank holidays, no photos since 2019, ignored reviews, a profile set up by someone who has long since left the business and whose email nobody has access to. Half of these are easy to fix in an hour. The last one is a nightmare but also solvable, via Google's ownership transfer process, with a lot of patience and a decent cup of tea.

How It Fits with Everything Else

Google Business Profile is one leg of a three-legged stool, along with a solid website and consistent citations across the web. None of the three works brilliantly without the others. If your website has issues, our piece on SEO-friendly websites is the next thing on your reading list.

A fully optimised Google Business Profile is, pound for pound, the highest-leverage free marketing job a local business can do. It takes a couple of afternoons to get right and then a few minutes a week to maintain. If you do nothing else this quarter, do this.