The Google Business Profile checklist we run for clients

For a local service business, your Google Business Profile is often seen by more people than your website. It appears in the map pack, in brand searches, and in "near me" queries — and most profiles we audit are running at half capacity. This is the checklist we run on every local SEO engagement.

Get the foundations exact

• Business name — exactly as it appears on your signage and website. No added keywords; that's a suspension risk, and competitors do report it.
• Primary category — the single most specific category that matches what you'd want to rank for. "Plumber" beats "Contractor" for a plumbing company, every time.
• Secondary categories — add every category you genuinely serve, and no more.
• Service area — set the towns you actually serve rather than a huge radius. Google cross-references this with where your reviews come from.

Fill the sections everyone skips

The difference between a profile that ranks and one that doesn't is usually the boring middle section:

• Services — add each service as its own entry with a description and, where sensible, a price range. These feed the queries your profile can match.
• Description — 750 characters. Lead with what you do and where, in plain words. Nobody ranks for adjectives.
• Photos — real jobs, real people, real trucks. Stock photography is visibly stock, and Google's systems increasingly favour original images.
• Q&A — seed it yourself with the five questions customers actually call to ask. You're allowed to; almost nobody does.

Reviews: a system, not a hope

Profiles with a steady drip of reviews outperform profiles with a burst of twenty from launch month. Build the ask into your job-completion process — a text with a direct review link on the day the work finishes converts best. Reply to every review, including the bad ones, in the same voice you'd use on the phone.

Measure it like a page

Your profile has its own analytics: calls, direction requests, website clicks. Wire the website clicks through a UTM-tagged URL so they show up in GA4 as their own source. If you don't, profile traffic hides inside "organic" and you'll never know what the profile is actually producing. We covered the event side of this in the GA4 events every lead-generation website needs.

SEO & Search VisibilityTechnical setup, local SEO, and Google Business Profile — done completely, measured honestly.→