Getting found locally: the Google Business Profile jobs most firms never finish

It is the free listing that decides whether you appear in the map results at all, what your name looks like when you do, and what someone sees before they decide whether to ring you or the next firm down. It sits above the ordinary blue links, and for local searches it takes a large share of the attention on the page.

Almost every small firm we look at has one. Almost none of them have finished it. The profile gets set up in a rush when the business starts, then nobody touches it for three years, and it quietly falls behind competitors who kept theirs current.

This is the list we actually run through when we take a profile on. None of it is clever. It is all just work that has to be done and then kept up.

Google is trying to work out whether the business it sees on your website, in an old directory, on your Facebook page and on a trade body listing are all the same business. Where the details disagree, it has to decide which to believe, and inconsistency reads as doubt.

The usual culprits are an old office address that was never updated on directories nobody at the company remembers signing up to, a landline that was replaced years ago, and a business name that appears in four slightly different forms. Suite numbers, abbreviations and trading names all count.

The job is dull and finite: find every place your details appear, decide on one canonical version, and correct the rest. We built a free checker for this on our own site if you want to see how scattered yours are before deciding whether it is worth the afternoon.

Reviews do two jobs at once. They feed into how you rank locally, and they are the thing a real human reads immediately before deciding whether to call you. A profile with a handful of old reviews looks abandoned even when the business is thriving.

The reliable way to get them is to build the asking into how you already work, at the natural moment when a customer is happiest. That is usually right after the job is finished and signed off, not a week later by email. A short link sent by text at the right moment works far better than a polite request at the wrong one.

What we will not do, and would advise you not to do, is buy reviews, write them yourself, or offer anything in exchange. Google is reasonably good at spotting these and the consequences are worse than the problem you were trying to fix. The same goes for inventing addresses in towns you do not have premises in.

Answer the bad ones calmly and factually. A measured reply to a harsh review reassures a reader far more than an unbroken run of five stars, which many people now read with suspicion anyway.

A profile that is updated occasionally looks different from one that has not been touched since it was created. Adding photographs now and then, keeping hours accurate, posting the occasional genuine update, and answering questions and reviews all signal that this is a business someone is actually running.

None of this needs to be a big job. Fifteen minutes a month, done consistently, puts you ahead of most local competitors, because most of them do nothing at all.

We are not going to tell you that finishing your profile puts you in the top three on the map. Local rankings depend on how close you are to the person searching, how relevant Google thinks you are and how prominent your business appears to be overall, and you only control some of that. Somebody physically nearer to the searcher may well sit above you whatever you do.

What finishing the profile does is remove the reasons you are being held back that are entirely within your control, and make you look like a business worth calling when you do appear. Those are worth having regardless of where you land on the map.

If you would rather this was done properly and then kept up rather than added to a list you never get to, that is what our local search work is. Either way, go and look at your own profile today. Most owners find at least three things on the list above.