Most small businesses I meet have a Google Business Profile they claimed once, filled in on a Tuesday, and have not opened since. It is still the first thing a lot of people see when they look you up, ahead of the website and ahead of the Facebook page. And it is quietly out of date.
Managing a profile is a real service now, sold by the month. So it is worth writing down what the work actually is, what Google itself says matters, and what nobody can promise you at any price.
What Google says decides local results
Start here, because everything else is downstream of it. Google publishes this in its own Business Profile help pages, so nobody had to reverse engineer it.
Local results are mainly based on three things: relevance, distance, and popularity. Relevance is how well your profile matches what somebody typed. Distance is how far you are from where they searched. Popularity, which Google also calls prominence on the same page, is how well known the business is.
Google also says, on that same page and in bold, that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. Keep that sentence handy. It is the fastest way to sort an honest provider from a bad one.
The rest of that page lists what you can actually control: verify the business, keep the information complete and accurate, respond to reviews, add photos and videos, and, for a retail store, add your in-store products. Short, public, and the whole job.
The work, in plain terms
Keeping the information true. Hours, address, phone, categories, attributes like parking. Google says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up in local results. This sounds trivial until you remember that holiday hours change, a phone number changes, and a category that made sense two years ago may not describe what you sell now. Somebody has to look.
Replying to reviews. Google says replying shows you value the feedback, and that positive reviews and helpful replies can help a business stand out. This is the only place in that whole document where reviews are tied to standing out, which is why it matters more than most of what gets sold as local SEO. A reply also takes about ninety seconds and most businesses still do not write one.
Photos, regularly. Not a stock shot of a building. The actual work, the actual room, the actual food. Clients hate this part, and it is the part that decides whether somebody picks you off a list of three.
Products, if you are a retail store. Google lets eligible retail businesses list in-store products, and says those products can show in local results. If you have a showroom and have never done this, a whole surface is sitting unused.
Reading the searches report. Almost nobody does this and it is the most useful thing on the profile. Google records the actual phrases people typed before they landed on you. Not guesses, the real list. I opened that report for a client and found the second and third most common searches were for a kind of shopping their profile never mentioned, which changed what we wrote for the next three months.
Posts. You can publish updates to a profile, and they show to people looking at it. Notice that posts are not on Google's list of things that affect local results. So treat them as what they are: a way to say something current to somebody who has already found you. That is a reasonable thing to want. It is not a ranking lever, and anyone telling you it is has not read the page.
What management cannot do
It cannot buy you a position. Google says so directly. Nobody can guarantee you the top of the map pack, and the promise itself is the warning sign.
It cannot move you closer to the searcher. Distance is one of the three factors and it is the one no amount of work touches. A shop twelve miles out of town competing for a search typed downtown is fighting geography.
It cannot manufacture reviews. Google's rules on that are strict and the penalty falls on the business, not on whoever wrote them. Asking your real customers is the only version of this that is safe, and we wrote the how of that up in getting more Google reviews without breaking the rules.
How to tell if yours is actually being managed
Four questions, and you can check three of them yourself in five minutes.
- Open your own profile and read it. Are the hours right today? Is the category still what you do? If the answer is no, nobody is looking at it.
- Look at your most recent review. Is there a reply, and does it read like a person wrote it about that specific review?
- Look at the newest photo. If the newest photo is older than the newest review, the profile is not being fed.
- Ask what the top search terms were last month. Anyone actually managing the profile can answer that in one line, because the report is right there. If the answer is a dashboard screenshot with no sentence attached, that is the tell.
What we do
Local search work sits inside our SEO Management service, alongside content and on-page work. It starts at $500 a month, month to month, with a short plain-English recap every month. The pricing is on the marketing pricing page rather than behind a call, for the reasons in why designers hide their prices.
What we will not do is promise a ranking. Google says nobody can sell one, and I am not going to be the exception.
If you are not ready to hand this to anybody, the article still works. Open your profile, fix the hours, reply to the last review, add three photos from your phone, and read the searches report. That is an afternoon, it costs nothing, and it is most of the value.