When someone searches “plumber near me” or “dentist Mandurah”, the first thing they see is not a website. It is the map pack: three businesses, their star ratings, and a call button. Most phone calls are placed from that block without the searcher ever scrolling to an organic result.
Google Business Profile is free. For local intent it routinely outranks every website on the page. And yet the majority of profiles we audit are unclaimed, half-filled, or categorised as the wrong kind of business entirely.
How Google decides who appears
Three factors drive local ranking: relevance, distance and prominence.
Relevance is how well your profile matches what was searched — driven by your categories, your listed services, and the words in your business description. Distance is how close you are to the searcher, and you cannot change it. Prominence is how well known and well reviewed you are, both on Google and across the wider web.
You cannot move your business closer to every customer. You can, entirely within your control, fix relevance and prominence — and that is where nearly all the available gain sits.
The checklist that moves the needle
1. Claim and verify it
You would be surprised how many businesses never have. An unverified profile can be edited by the public, cannot post updates, and ranks poorly. If someone else claimed it — a former marketing provider, for instance — you can request ownership through Google.
2. Get your primary category exactly right
This is the highest-impact field on the entire profile and the one most commonly wrong. “Plumber” and “Plumbing Supply Store” are different categories that rank for different searches. Choose the one that describes what you primarily are, then add secondary categories for the rest. Check what the businesses currently outranking you have chosen.
3. Fill in every field, including the ones that seem pointless
Services, products, attributes, opening hours, holiday hours, the business description, the year established. Completeness is itself a signal, and each field is another chance to match a search. If you offer emergency work, that needs to appear as a listed service — not just be implied.
4. Set your service area honestly
Mobile businesses should run as a service area business, which lets you hide your street address while still verifying one. Home-based operators in particular should do this rather than publishing a residential address. List the suburbs you genuinely cover; inflating the radius to the entire metro area does not help you rank in suburbs you are nowhere near.
5. Add real photos, regularly
Photos of actual jobs, your actual team and your actual premises outperform stock imagery substantially. Profiles with recent photos get more clicks, and activity feeds prominence. Add a few every month rather than twenty once.
6. Collect reviews steadily and reply to every one
Review count, average rating and recency all feed ranking, and reviews heavily influence which of the three listings gets the call. A steady trickle of recent reviews beats a large batch from two years ago.
Ask in person at the moment the customer is happiest, then follow up with a direct link. Never offer an incentive — it breaches Google policy and, for businesses in regulated industries, may breach professional advertising rules as well. Reply to negatives calmly and factually; prospective customers read the reply more carefully than the complaint.
7. Post updates, offers and job photos
Posts appear on your listing and signal that the business is active. Weekly or fortnightly is plenty. Seasonal posts published ahead of demand work particularly well for trades and hospitality.
8. Answer the questions section yourself
Anyone can answer questions on your listing, including competitors and confused members of the public. Seed it with the questions you genuinely get asked and answer them properly. Left unattended, it fills with wrong information.
9. Use the products and services sections properly
These are separate from your categories and they are consistently underused. Each service you add is another entity Google can match against a search, and each one gets its own short description. A plumber listing “blocked drain clearing”, “hot water system replacement” and “gas leak detection” as distinct services is telling Google far more than one listing the category “Plumber” and nothing else.
The products section works similarly for retail and hospitality, and product entries display visually on the listing — which lifts click-through even when position does not change.
10. Turn messaging on, or turn it off deliberately
Google can offer a message button on your listing. It is genuinely useful for capturing enquiries from people who will not phone, but an unanswered message is worse than no message button at all, and Google will disable it if you consistently fail to respond. Decide which you are doing rather than leaving it on by accident.
11. Multi-location businesses need separate profiles
Two shopfronts need two profiles, each with its own address, hours and reviews, and each pointing at its own location page on your website — not at your homepage. Businesses that run a single profile for multiple sites rank poorly at both and cannot be found reliably at either.
The mistake that quietly kills rankings
Inconsistent details across directories. If your business is “TVDM Pty Ltd” on one site, “TVDM” on another, and lists two different phone numbers, Google becomes less certain about who and where you are — and uncertainty costs prominence.
Your name, address and phone number should be byte-identical everywhere: your website, your profile, Yellow Pages, True Local, Hotfrog, your industry associations, your social profiles. A citation clean-up is unglamorous work and it is frequently the fastest local ranking win available.
Things that can get you suspended
Keyword-stuffing your business name (“Bob’s Plumbing | Emergency Plumber Perth 24/7”) is the most common cause of suspension we see, and the ranking benefit is temporary anyway. Using a virtual office or a mailbox as your address, listing a business at an address you do not operate from, and creating multiple listings for the same location will all cause problems. Reinstatement is slow and not guaranteed.
Your industry changes the priorities
The checklist above applies to everyone, but the order you work through it should not be the same for every business. For emergency trades, hours and service-area accuracy matter more than almost anything else, because a listing that says closed at the moment of the search is invisible regardless of how well optimised it is otherwise — we cover that in detail in our notes on SEO for plumbers.
For regulated health practices the constraint runs the other way: reviews are valuable but soliciting them carelessly can breach professional advertising rules, so the emphasis shifts toward completeness, treatment listings and clear fee information. Our guide to SEO for dental practices works through what is and is not permitted.
Retail and hospitality live or die on photos, current hours and the products section, because those are what display in the listing itself and drive the click before anyone has read a word.
Measure it properly
The profile’s own insights show searches, views, calls, direction requests and website clicks. Calls and direction requests are the closest thing to a revenue metric available for free anywhere in local marketing — track them monthly and you will know within weeks whether your local work is producing.
Add UTM parameters to your profile’s website link so the traffic shows up separately in analytics. Most businesses have no idea how much of their website traffic arrives from the listing, because it is bundled into organic by default.
Where it fits with everything else
The profile does the heavy lifting for local intent, but it points at your website, and a slow or unconvincing site wastes the click. The two work together — which is why our SEO services always cover both, and why the free audit reviews your profile alongside your site. Trades in particular should read our notes on building a website that converts trade enquiries, since the profile and the site have to agree on hours, service areas and contact details to rank well.