The nine-point Google Business Profile checklist

This is the checklist we run before touching an ad account, a website or anything else.

It goes first because for a large share of local service searches the decision happens inside the map pack — three results, a star rating, a call button — and no website is ever involved. The profile is the storefront. It is also free, which makes neglecting it the most expensive bargain in local marketing.

Work through these in order.

1. Is the primary category exactly right?

This is the single highest-impact field on the profile and the one most often wrong.

Google weighs the primary category heavily when deciding which searches you can appear for. “Contractor” and “Bathroom remodeler” are not interchangeable. Pick the most specific category that genuinely describes your main service, then add secondary categories for the rest.

If you are not sure what to pick, look at what the businesses already ranking for your target search have chosen.

2. Does the service list actually list your services?

Most profiles have two or three services listed because that is what Google suggested during setup.

Add every service you genuinely offer, with the descriptions filled in. This is free text that Google reads, and it is one of the few places you can be specific about what you do without a website involved.

3. Is the service area set by drive time, not by ambition?

Listing the entire metro feels like reach. In practice it dilutes relevance for the areas you can actually serve, and it generates calls from people ninety minutes away whose jobs lose money on the drive.

Set it to where your crews can profitably get to. For most Austin-area businesses that is a tighter area than instinct suggests.

4. Are the hours correct, including holidays?

Wrong hours are a ranking and conversion problem at once. Google suppresses closed businesses for some searches, and a customer who calls during listed hours and gets no answer is unlikely to try again.

If you answer calls after hours, say so. If you do not, do not list hours you cannot keep.

5. Are there real photographs, added recently?

Not stock. Not the logo on a white background.

Actual vans, actual crews, actual completed work. Profiles with current photos get more engagement, and Google notices engagement. Adding a few images a month is a ten-minute job that most competitors never do.

6. Is the review profile still growing?

A burst of fifteen reviews from eighteen months ago reads worse to a customer than a steady trickle, and recency carries weight with Google too.

The fix is to stop asking manually. A request that fires automatically when a job is marked complete produces the steady pattern that compounds; relying on someone remembering at the end of a long day produces bursts and then silence.

7. Are reviews being replied to — including the bad ones?

Every review, briefly, in your own voice.

Negative reviews matter more than positive ones here. A calm, specific, non-defensive reply is read by every future customer who scrolls past it, and it frequently does more good than the review did harm. Arguing does the opposite.

8. Is the Q&A section seeded?

Almost nobody uses this, which is exactly why it is worth ten minutes.

You can ask and answer questions on your own profile. Put the three questions you field on every single call — pricing structure, how quickly you can come out, what areas you cover — and answer them plainly. It is free text in a prominent position that your competitors have left blank.

9. Is messaging either on and answered, or off?

Messaging enabled and ignored is worse than messaging disabled. Google tracks response rate, and an unanswered message is a customer who has already moved on.

Turn it on only if someone will actually watch it.

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What this adds up to

None of the nine costs anything. Most take minutes. Together they routinely outperform the first month of an advertising budget, because the baseline on most profiles is so poor.

Work through them before you spend on anything else. If the profile is neglected, paid traffic is being poured into a leaking container, and you will conclude that advertising does not work when the real problem was upstream the whole time.

If you want us to run through yours and tell you what is missing, book a call — it takes about fifteen minutes and there is nothing attached to it.