Google Business Profile: the optimisation guide

Your Google Business Profile (GBP, formerly Google My Business) is the single most important asset in local SEO. It decides whether you appear in the Map Pack, what people see before they click, whether they call, whether they ask for directions, whether they trust you. Most businesses fill in 60% of it and stop. The gap between 60% and 100% is where the rankings live.

Claim, verify, and lock down ownership

Before anything else, own your listing. Search Google for your business, click "Own this business?", and follow the verification flow. Verification options have expanded over the past two years. Postcard, phone, email, video, and instant verification all exist now, and Google chooses based on what it can already confirm about you. Newer businesses or those with thin online presence will typically get video verification, where you walk through your premises on a recorded call.

Once verified, add at least one secondary owner from your team, ideally someone who is not going anywhere soon. If a single account gets compromised or someone leaves the business, you don't want to be locked out of your most important marketing asset. We have seen agencies lose access to client GBPs because the only listed owner was a former employee whose Google account was deactivated.

Pick the right primary category

Your primary category does more for rankings than any other single field. It tells Google what queries you should appear for. The rule is simple: pick the most specific category that accurately describes what you do.

The trap most businesses fall into is choosing a too-broad category to "rank for more things". You won't. Google will rank you weakly for the broad term and miss the specific terms entirely, because the specific category is what triggers relevance for the queries that actually convert. Pick the specific one. Add the broader category as a secondary if it's still relevant.

You can add up to 9 secondary categories. Each one opens you up to additional query types. Each one also confuses your relevance if it's a stretch. The right number for most businesses is between 3 and 6. Filling all 9 with weakly related categories actively hurts.

Business name: exactly as it appears on your signage

Use your real business name. No keyword stuffing. Names like "ABC Plumbing - Boiler Repair London" violate Google's guidelines, your competitors will report you, and you will get suspended. The legitimate exception is when your registered business name actually contains a descriptor (for example "London Vintage Watches Ltd"). In that case you can use it, but it has to match Companies House.

If your business has changed name recently, update your GBP and update your website on the same day. Mismatched names between your website and your GBP are a common suspension trigger.

Address, service area, and the hidden-storefront question

How you set your address depends on how customers reach you:

Hours, special hours, and the bank holiday problem

Set your normal opening hours. Then schedule special hours for every UK bank holiday at the start of each year. Listings that don't update for bank holidays look stale. Listings that do appear current and trustworthy.

If you offer different hours for different services, use the "More hours" feature rather than cramming it into your description. The kitchen closes at 9pm but the bar at 11pm? Add it. Pickup hours different from in-store hours? Add it. The drive-thru is open later than the dining room? Add it. These show directly in the listing UI and reduce confused customers.

Description: 750 characters of practical positioning

Write the description for humans, not for keyword density. Lead with what you actually do, who you serve, and what makes you specifically chooseable. Avoid these common pitfalls:

Services and products: the secret completeness lever

Most businesses skip these. Don't. Adding services and products does three things at once. They surface in the GBP UI as scannable lists that customers can browse. They feed search relevance for those specific service queries. They give you a structured way to mention long-tail keywords without cramming them in your description.

Aim for 10 to 30 services with brief descriptions, even if they're closely related. For products, add the ones a customer would search for. A salon might list specific treatments (gel manicure, paraffin treatment, microdermabrasion). A plumber might list specific jobs (boiler repair, leak detection, power flushing).

Attributes: small flags, real signal

Attributes are the checkboxes for things like "wheelchair accessible", "free Wi-Fi", "outdoor seating", "LGBTQ+ friendly", "veteran-owned", "online appointments". They take five minutes to fill. They surface in the listing as visual badges, drive filtered-search appearances ("restaurants with outdoor seating near me"), and signal completeness to Google.

Tick every applicable one. Don't tick ones that aren't actually true, even if it seems harmless. Customers complaining about a missing feature you claimed to have is the fastest way to get a one-star review.

Photos: the unglamorous engine of clicks

Listings with 100+ photos get noticeably more views, calls, and direction requests than listings with under 10. Photos are also the most visible part of your listing on mobile, where most searches happen.

What to upload, in order of priority:

• Logo (clean, square, transparent if possible)
• Cover photo (your strongest single image of the business)
• Exterior, from the street, in daylight (helps people find you)
• Interior, multiple angles, well-lit, recent
• Team photos (real staff, not stock)
• Products, services, work in progress
• Geo-tagged photos taken on-site (some evidence this helps prove the address)
• Seasonal updates: refresh the cover photo every quarter

Posts: not for SEO, but for conversion

GBP Posts (offers, events, updates) don't directly move rankings. They do appear in the listing and influence whether someone clicks through to your competitor instead. Post weekly if you can. Offer posts work best for retail and hospitality. Update posts work best for service businesses.

A post with a clear photo, a single sentence, and a CTA button outperforms a wall of text every time. Treat them like Instagram captions, not blog posts.

Reviews: the loop that compounds

Reviews are a ranking factor and the strongest conversion factor. Reply to every review within 48 hours, positive and negative. Replies are public, and Google evaluates them for sentiment and recency. They also influence the next reader more than people realise: a thoughtful reply to a one-star review reassures more than ten positive reviews.

We've covered the full review playbook (timing, channels, scripts, handling negatives) in how to get more Google reviews.

Q&A: pre-empt your own questions

The Questions section appears prominently on listings. Customers can ask anything, and any other user can answer (badly, sometimes). Pre-empt this by posting your own FAQs as questions and answering them yourself. Google explicitly allows this. Things like "do you offer parking?", "do you take card?", "what's your booking process?", "do I need to bring anything to my first appointment?".

Ten well-answered Q&A entries can do more for conversion than another 50 photos. Most businesses ignore this section entirely.

Optimisation order: where to spend the next 4 hours

If you have a free afternoon and want to make the highest-impact changes possible to your GBP, here's the order:

Re-audit quarterly

GBP fields and Google's policies change. Categories get renamed, attributes get added, fields get deprecated. We've seen GBP roll out new "AI-summary" attributes, deprecate the old "Q&A surface" interface, change how services are structured, and add new media types in the past 18 months alone. Run a structured audit at least quarterly to catch anything new.

Or, if you'd rather not chase the surface area manually, our GBP Audit tool scores your listing across all the fields above and tells you exactly what's missing.

Quarterly checklist

• Primary category still the most specific accurate match
• Secondary categories all genuinely relevant (not stretched)
• Services list current, with new offerings added
• Photos uploaded in the last 30 days
• Description still reflects current positioning
• Special hours scheduled for upcoming bank holidays
• Attributes reflect current operations (e.g. Wi-Fi, accessibility)
• Q&A section has answers from you to common questions
• Posts have been published in the last 4 weeks
• All reviews from the last quarter have replies
• Review velocity is at least 4 new reviews per month
• Backup owner still has access (and isn't an ex-employee)

Where to go next