What is a Google Business Profile?
This free service from Google enhances a business's visibility in search results and helps them connect with local customers. Businesses can showcase their products and services, share updates and promotions, and engage with their audience effectively. The platform provides insights into customer behavior and search trends. If you’re a local business a Google Business Profile account is crucial for users to find and navigate to your business. You want to make sure your account is as optimized and up-to-date as possible and we’ll show you how.
Where does a Google Business Profile show up?
A Google Business Profile profile shows up in two places: the Maps and the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) .
Maps:
SERP:
The SERP is also where you edit the profile.
How to optimize a Google Business Profile?
Edit Profile - About your business
- Business Name: Your business name
- Business Category: Category that describes your business
- Description: 750 or less characters describing the business.
- Opening Date: Date the business opened, if unable to find specific data to Jan 1 or the first of the month it opened with the year
Edit Profile - Contact information
- Phone Number: Ideally specific to the Google Business Profile profile so you can easily track how many phone calls you get
- Website: Homepage link with UTM parameters for tracking
- Social Profiles: Links to social media profiles
Edit Profile - Location and areas
- Business Location: Business’ address
- Service Area: Zip codes, counties, or cities that the business serves
Edit Profile - Business hours
- Hours: Hours during the week that the business is consistently open
- Special Hours: Hours for holidays or special events
- Add More Hours: If specific breakfast, senior, pickup, online, etc. hours add them, if not leave blank
Edit Profile - More
- From The Business: Identifies as Asian-owned, Black-owned, disabled-owned, Indigenous-owned, Latino-owned, LGBTQ+ owned, veteran-owned, or women-owned
- Accessibility: Has wheelchair accessible elevator, wheelchair accessible restroom, or wheelchair accessible seating
- Amenities: Has gender-neutral restroom, or has a restroom
- Children: Has nursing room
- Crowd: LGBTQ+ friendly, or transgender safe space
- Planning: Appointment required or accepts new patients
- Service Options: Offers online care & language options
Services
- Primary Category: The main portion of your business (an example being a marketing agency)
- Secondary Categories: A more niche area of the business, so if your primary category is marketing agency your secondary categories could be website designer and internet marketing
- Custom Services: If there are categories that are not included within the available ones create custom ones under the primary and secondary categories.
Photos
- Photo Or Video: Including interior, exterior, headshots, etc. of the business
- Logo: Square logo image
- Cover Photo: Main photo that will show up on the Google Business Profile profile
Other
- Add Updates
- Add Events
- Add Offers
- Booking: A link to your online booking tool, usually a contact page
- Performance: No need to optimize but can be used for reporting
- Calls: Similar to performance cannot optimize but is useful
- Q&A: People can ask questions or you can add some common questions and answers
- Messages: People can send messages and this is where the client should be able to respond to them
- Products: This area is not touched for the most part unless a client has products in which case they’ll be added if keeping up with stock changes is not a challenge
- Advertise: This is LSA or local service ads and it will send you to a different platform
How to add someone to a Google Business Profile?
Click on the three dots next to profile strength and then Business Profile settings
Then click on people and access then add people One thing to note is that only an owner of this Business Profile can add, edit, or remove people's access.
To Wrap it up
If you’ve completed all these steps then you should have a fully optimized Google Business Profile account, congratulations! Don’t forget to keep it updated, and add events and offers. There’s so much you can do and especially if you’re a local business you must have everything optimized and accurate. If you need help with your local SEO or SEO in general, contact us at Instrumental Group!