The most valuable page about your business is one you do not own.
For a business people search for locally, the Google Business Profile does more work than the website. It decides whether you appear in the map results, and it answers the questions people would otherwise ring to ask.
It is free, most businesses have one, and almost none of them have finished filling it in.
Clutch 5.0/5 - Melbourne head office - Servicing Australia-wide
This listing is the local competition.
The map results are decided here, not on your website.
When somebody searches for a business near them, Google shows a small group of listings above everything else. Which businesses appear is driven largely by the profile: categories, service area, completeness and reviews.
A neglected profile keeps you out of that group regardless of how good the website is.
It also answers questions before anyone calls.
Hours, whether you are open now, what you do, where you go, what it looks like, what other people said. Every one of those answered on the listing is a call your team does not have to take.
Which also means every one of them left blank or wrong is an enquiry going to whoever did fill theirs in.
What a finished profile actually has.
Correct categories
The primary category carries the most weight of any single field, and a surprising number of businesses have the wrong one.
Service area or address
A shopfront and a mobile business need opposite settings. Getting this wrong caps where you can appear at all.
Hours that are true
Including public holidays. A listing showing open when you are closed produces a bad first experience and a poor review.
Reviews and replies
A way of asking that your team keeps doing, and replies to what arrives - both feed ranking and both are read by the next customer.
Products, services, attributes
The fields most profiles leave empty. They are how you appear for searches beyond your own trade name.
The numbers it reports
Calls, direction requests, website clicks and the searches that found you - the closest thing to free market research you have.
What businesses ask about their profile.
Is this the same as Google My Business?
Yes - Google renamed it Google Business Profile in 2021. Anything still calling it My Business is working from old information, which is worth noticing when choosing who manages it.
We do not have a shopfront. Can we still have a listing?
Yes. A service-area business hides the address and lists the areas it covers instead. It has to be set up that way deliberately, and doing it wrong is a common reason mobile trades never appear outside their own suburb.
Somebody left an unfair review. Can it be removed?
Only if it breaks Google's rules, and most unflattering reviews do not. What is reliably effective is replying calmly in public - future customers read the reply as much as the complaint.
We will not attempt to bury reviews or generate false ones. Both get found.
Can we manage it ourselves?
Yes, and many businesses should. It is mostly a matter of knowing which fields matter and keeping a review habit going. We are happy to set it up properly and hand it over.
See what your profile is missing.
Give us your business name and suburb. We will check the listing against what actually drives map results and tell you what is incomplete.