Before anyone calls you, before they even open your website, almost every prospect does the same thing: they type your trade and their town into Google. What they see first is not your site. It is a boxed set of three businesses, the local pack, sitting under a map with stars and photos. Your Google Business Profile has become your real shop window, and for a lot of local businesses it is the only one that matters.
Yet most profiles are set up once and then left alone: opening hours wrong since two winters ago, no recent photos, reviews sitting there unanswered. The result is a completely free channel quietly working against you. Here is how Google decides who shows up, what you can genuinely influence, and how to keep a profile healthy in twenty minutes a week. Every feature mentioned here is documented in the Google Business Profile Help Centre.
How Google picks the three profiles it shows
Google ranks local results on three factors it states openly:
- Relevance: how well the search matches what your profile describes. A profile that says "pergola installation" will be judged more relevant for that query than one with a vague label.
- Distance: the gap between the searcher and your premises. This is the only factor you cannot work on. You live with it.
- Prominence: everything Google knows about you elsewhere, links to your site, mentions on other pages, and above all customer reviews. This is where you have the most leverage.
The practical consequence: two neighbouring businesses offering the same work will be separated by the relevance of their profile and by their prominence. In other words, by the quality of the work done on the profile itself. That is good news, because the local pack is not won on budget alone.
The four levers that actually move a profile
1. The primary category. This is the single heaviest field you will fill in, because Google uses it to decide which searches you appear on. Pick the most precise option available ("pergola installer" rather than "construction company"), then add secondary categories for your adjacent services. Get the primary category wrong and every other optimisation sits on a bad foundation.
2. A profile filled to one hundred percent. Every empty field is both a weaker relevance signal and a missed opportunity: detailed services, service area, attributes (free quote, insurance, payment methods), a description written in the words your customers actually use. A complete profile also converts better. The prospect comparing three listings picks the one that answers the most questions.
3. Reviews: volume, rhythm, replies. Reviews are the heart of local prominence, and the average star rating is not the whole story. Google also reads the pace at which reviews arrive and whether you reply. A profile collecting two or three reviews a month, with the owner answering every one of them, negatives included, calmly and concretely, outperforms a silent 4.9 star profile. Ask every satisfied customer for a review, and ask at the right moment: just after the job is finished or the order delivered.
4. Photos and questions. Profiles with recent photos get noticeably more calls and more direction requests, because a photo reassures faster than a paragraph. Post real finished work, mention the location in the caption, and fill the questions and answers section yourself before strangers fill it in for you.
What turns an impression into a phone call
Showing up in the local pack is one thing. Getting the searcher to tap your number is another. The conversion elements of a profile:
- Accurate opening hours, updated for every public holiday and every closure. A profile wrongly marked "closed" on a Saturday morning hands the call to the competitor next door.
- A working call button and an up to date website link: check that the link lands on a page that loads fast on a phone.
- Regular posts (offers, finished jobs, news). They carry little ranking weight, but they show a living business to someone comparing options.
- Replies to negative reviews. Whoever reads the reviews reads your answers too. A calm, factual reply that offers a solution often reverses the impression the review itself left.
The twenty minute weekly routine
A profile is not optimised in a day, it is maintained. Here is a rhythm that survives contact with a real working week:
- Five minutes, reply to every new review, no exceptions.
- Five minutes, check that nothing has been changed on your behalf. Google and users can both edit hours, name and category. Correct anything that moved.
- Five minutes, publish a photo or a post about one job from the week.
- Five minutes, read the profile statistics: how many views, how many calls, which searches triggered them. That dashboard is what tells you whether the profile is gaining ground.
Twenty minutes a week is the difference between a living shop window and a ghost listing. It is also the only maintenance that protects the work you already did, because an inactive profile erodes while competitors keep posting and keep collecting reviews.
The mistakes that sink a profile
- Buying or manufacturing reviews. Google detects them and removes them, sometimes in whole batches, and can suspend the profile. A slow, genuine flow beats a suspicious spike.
- Stuffing keywords into the business name. The temptation to write "Martin Plumbing, boiler repair renovation" is real. It breaks the guidelines and the suspension risk is real too.
- Contradictory information between the profile, the website and directories. Name, address and phone number must be identical everywhere. Every discrepancy chips away at the algorithm's confidence.
- Ignoring negative reviews. With no reply, they become your reply.
- Creating duplicate profiles to "take up more space". They end up merged or suspended, and they split your reviews.
The profile is the foundation, advertising is the accelerator
A well maintained profile works for you every day with no budget, but it takes weeks to reach full effect and it only reaches people who are already searching. To fill a diary faster, when you are launching, working a short season or chasing an ambitious target, advertising that creates demand complements the channel that captures it. That is the logic behind generating qualified enquiries for a local service, and the comparison in Meta Ads versus Google Ads for a local business covers where each channel earns its place.
Start with a solid local foundation: a complete profile, a steady flow of reviews, visual proof of the work. Then you have something worth amplifying.
A Google profile is never "finished". It is an asset you maintain. But it is one of the very few marketing assets that costs nothing, is visible to every nearby prospect, and lands at the exact moment they choose. The rest of the acquisition and local growth guides are on the Solvya blog.