Setting up your Google Business Profile

Set it up

Go to google.com/business and sign in with the Google account you want to own this permanently — not a personal address you might lose access to, and not one owned by an employee.

Enter the exact legal business name. Do not add keywords. 'Smith Plumbing Denver Emergency 24/7' is a suspension risk, not a ranking trick.

Choose your primary category carefully. It is the strongest single signal for which searches you appear in. Add secondary categories after, but the primary one matters most by a wide margin.

If you serve customers at their location rather than yours, set a service area and hide your address. Home-based businesses that publish a home address get filtered out of results and get unwanted visitors.

Get verified

Google verifies by postcard, phone, email or video depending on the category and how much it already knows about you. Video verification is increasingly common and is the one that catches people out.

For video you will need to show your premises, your equipment or vehicle with branding, and evidence you control the business — signage, tools, stock. Have it ready before you start, because the session cannot be paused.

If verification fails, the usual causes are a mismatch between your address and what is on your other listings, or a name that does not match your registration. Fix the mismatch before appealing.

Fill it in properly

Hours, including holidays. Wrong hours generate one-star reviews from people who drove to a closed business.

Photographs, and keep adding them. Profiles with recent photographs get more engagement. Exterior, interior, team, finished work. Update monthly if you can.

Services with descriptions. Every service you list is a term you can appear for.

The website field. Link to your site. Profiles that link to a real site tend to perform better than profiles that link to nothing.

Q&A. You can ask and answer your own questions, and you should — it is the cheapest way to handle the objections that stop people calling.

Reviews are most of the ranking

Ask every satisfied customer, every time. The single most effective method is a short link sent by text within an hour of finishing the job.

Reply to all of them, including the bad ones. A calm reply to a one-star review persuades more readers than the review discourages.

Never buy reviews and never offer anything in exchange. Google detects it, the penalty is severe, and recovering a suspended profile is far harder than earning the reviews honestly.

The mistakes that cost the most

Keyword-stuffing the business name — the most common cause of suspension.

Publishing a home address for a mobile business instead of setting a service area.

Letting an agency create the profile on their own account, so you cannot take it with you. Always own it yourself and grant access.

Setting it up once and never touching it again. Activity is a ranking factor; dormant profiles slide.