If you run a business that people search for locally — a salon, a garage, a firm of accountants, a plumber covering three postcodes — there is a very good chance your Google Business Profile is doing more work than your website. It is what shows up in the map results, it holds your reviews, and it carries the button people press to phone you. It costs nothing. Most owners set it up once, in a hurry, and never open it again.
That was survivable while the profile was just a listing. It is less survivable now that Google has tightened verification and stepped up automated enforcement against spam and fake listings. A profile can be suspended, and a suspended profile is not a marketing inconvenience — it is your main source of enquiries disappearing on a Tuesday morning with no warning.
Get the primary category right before you touch anything else
The biggest single lever on the profile is the primary category, because it largely determines which searches you are eligible to appear in at all. Everything else — photos, posts, descriptions — is fine-tuning around that choice.
Pick the category that matches what buyers type, not the broadest one available or the one that best describes your qualifications. A firm doing bookkeeping and payroll that wants tax work should be under 'Accountant', with 'Bookkeeping service' and 'Payroll service' added as secondary categories, because those secondaries widen your reach without diluting the main signal. Add every secondary that is genuinely true, and none that is not — categories you cannot back up are one of the things enforcement looks at.
Verification is the part that now bites
Google's verification process has become noticeably stricter, with video verification used far more widely, existing profiles being asked to verify again, and a prompt in the flow asking whether the business is online-only. Answer that one carefully. If you visit customers at their homes or premises, you are a service-area business with a hidden address — not an online-only business. Describing the model wrongly at setup is one of the quieter causes of suspension months later, when Google concludes the listing does not match reality.
If you are asked for a video, prepare it rather than filming on the spot. It generally needs to show the location, something identifying it as yours — signage, branded vehicles, equipment, stock — and evidence you have authority over the premises, filmed as one continuous walk rather than clips. Postcard verification to the business address is still used in the UK and takes a couple of weeks, which is a long time to have no listing, so do not create a second profile while you wait. Duplicates are themselves a suspension trigger.
A profile your agency owns is a profile you can lose in a fee dispute. Ask for owner-level access in your own account, in writing, before the first invoice.
What actually needs filling in
Opening hours, including bank holidays, are worth more attention than they get: a wrong hour sends someone on a wasted journey, and a wasted journey is how you collect a one-star review that outlives the mistake by years. Set special hours in advance for the August and Christmas closures rather than fixing them afterwards.
Beyond that, the list is short. A description written for a human rather than stuffed with search terms. Your services listed individually, with prices where you are comfortable publishing them. Real photographs, added regularly, of the actual premises, team and work — the stock-image version of your business is obvious and persuades nobody. And the questions and answers section, which almost everyone ignores even though you are allowed to post your own questions and answer them. Put the objections there: parking, call-out charges, whether you cover a particular town, how quickly you respond.
Turn on messaging only if someone will genuinely answer it within the hour. An unanswered message is worse than no messaging button at all.
Reviews are the bit you can actually influence
Ask at the moment the customer thanks you, not a fortnight later by email. Have the review link saved on your phone so asking takes ten seconds. Respond to every review, briefly, including the bad ones — and especially the bad ones, because the reply is written for the next reader rather than the angry one. Never argue about the facts of a job in public, and never disclose anything about the customer while defending yourself.
What not to do is equally clear: do not buy reviews, do not offer a discount in exchange for one, and do not screen customers so that only the happy ones get asked. All three breach Google's policies, and a sudden cluster of five-star reviews written in the same week is exactly the pattern automated enforcement is looking for. A steady trickle is both safer and more convincing.
What is not worth your time
Two things absorb effort out of all proportion to what they return. The first is posting updates several times a week. Posts are genuinely useful for a specific offer, an opening-hours change or a seasonal service, and they are worth doing when you have something to say — but a treadmill of weekly posts written for the sake of it will not move you up the map results, and the hour is better spent on photographs and review replies.
The second is the business name field, which is the most tempting and most dangerous box on the whole profile. Adding your services or your town to it — 'Smith Plumbing Manchester Emergency Boiler Repair' — is a direct policy breach, and it is one of the most commonly reported and enforced. Competitors report it, because it is easy to spot and it works against them. Put your actual trading name in, exactly as it appears on your signage and invoices, and win the search on categories and reviews instead.
Be similarly sceptical about anyone selling a monthly package to 'optimise' the listing or submit you to hundreds of directories. The work that moves local enquiries is the work described above, most of it takes minutes, and none of it requires a subscription.
Put a number on it, then keep it alive
Say you get 45 calls a month through the profile, one in four of them turns into a job, and the average job is worth £320. That is 11 jobs and roughly £3,520 of work a month arriving from a free listing. At a 55% gross margin it is about £1,935 of gross profit a month, or £23,000 a year, from something that costs nothing but attention — which makes the hour spent completing it properly the best-paid hour in your month, and makes a suspension a genuine business risk rather than an IT annoyance.
Measure it rather than assuming. Add a tracking parameter to the website link on your profile so your analytics separates map traffic from everything else, and keep a tally of where enquiries say they came from. That single habit tells you more about your marketing than most agency reports do, and it feeds directly into how to set a marketing budget when you have no idea what 'normal' looks like.
Then give it half an hour a month. Check the hours are right, including anything upcoming. Add two photographs. Answer any new questions. Reply to every review since last time. And check the profile still says what you wrote — Google applies suggested edits from the public, and businesses have had hours, categories and even addresses changed underneath them by a well-meaning stranger.
None of this is marketing genius. It is the local-search equivalent of keeping the shop window clean, and it converts a search into a phone call more reliably than anything else you can do for free. What happens after the phone rings is a separate skill, and how to write a quote that wins the job covers that end of it.
Common questions
How long does Google Business Profile verification take?
It depends on the method. Postcard verification to a UK business address typically takes up to two weeks to arrive, and the code expires, so watch for it. Video verification is usually reviewed within a few days, though it can take longer when the reviewer wants more evidence and it can be rejected outright if the footage does not show the premises, your branding and your authority over the location in one continuous take. Whichever route you are on, do not create a second profile while waiting — duplicate listings are a common cause of suspension and make the eventual fix considerably slower.
Can I have a profile without publishing my home address?
Yes. If you travel to customers rather than serving them at your premises, set the profile up as a service-area business: you still enter your address during setup so Google can verify you exist, but you then hide it from public view and list the towns or postcodes you cover instead. This is the correct setting for trades, mobile therapists, consultants working from home and anyone without a shopfront. What you should not do is invent a commercial address or use a mailbox to look bigger, which breaches the guidelines and risks losing the listing entirely.
Is it against the rules to ask customers for reviews?
Asking is fine and encouraged. What breaches Google's policies is incentivising them — offering a discount, a prize entry or anything else in exchange — and review gating, meaning asking only the customers you already know are happy while quietly routing unhappy ones elsewhere. Buying reviews is a clear breach and the pattern is easy to spot. The safest approach is to ask everyone, at the point they thank you, using a link saved on your phone, and to accept that an occasional average review among genuine ones makes the whole profile more believable to a reader.
What should I do if my profile gets suspended?
Work out the cause before you touch anything, because the appeal is judged on whether the listing now complies. The usual causes are a business model that does not match the listing type, an address that cannot be verified, keyword-stuffed business names, or duplicate profiles. Fix the underlying issue, gather evidence that you operate from the address — a lease, a utility bill, signage photographs, insurance documents — and submit a reinstatement request through the profile. Do not create a replacement listing in the meantime: it undermines the appeal and can result in both profiles being removed.
