Google Business Profile — how to set it up and get found locally

When someone searches Google for “plumber near me” or “web design Gliwice”, a map with three businesses appears above the regular results. That’s the so-called local pack — and for many local businesses it’s the most valuable spot on the entire internet. Who lands there is decided mainly by the Google Business Profile.

In short: the profile is free, takes a few minutes to set up, and its ranking depends on three things: relevance (categories and description), distance from the searcher, and prominence (reviews, activity, your website). You can’t influence distance. The other two you can influence a lot.

Step 1: create and verify the profile

1. Go to the Google Business Profile page and sign in with a Google account that belongs to the company (not to an employee or an agency — a common problem when you part ways).
2. Enter the business name exactly as it is in real life. Stuffing keywords into the name (“Smith — cheap plumber Gliwice”) breaks Google’s rules and can get the profile suspended.
3. Choose whether customers come to you (an address) or you go to them (a service area).
4. Complete verification. Google usually asks for a short video of your premises and signage, sometimes a phone call, text message or postcard. Without verification the profile won’t be shown.

Step 2: fill in everything you can

Google openly favours complete profiles. Before you try to “rank” anything, make sure you have:

• a primary category that’s as precise as possible (e.g. “Website designer”, not a generic “Services”) plus a few relevant secondary categories,
• opening hours, including holiday hours — outdated hours are one of the most common causes of bad reviews,
• a business description written for people: what you do, for whom, and in which area,
• services or products with short descriptions and indicative prices,
• a link to your website — ideally to a page tailored to the town, if you have one,
• photos: logo, cover photo, interior, team, finished work. Real photos beat stock images.

Step 3: keep your details consistent (NAP)

NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone. These should look identical everywhere: in the profile, on your website, in business directories, on Facebook. If one place says “1 Main St” and another “1/3 Main Street”, Google is less certain it’s the same business. It’s worth going through the popular directories once and fixing old details, e.g. after a move.

Step 4: collect reviews and reply to them

Reviews are the strongest signal you genuinely control. A few rules that work:

• ask for a review right after a successful job, sending a direct link (you’ll find it in the profile dashboard),
• reply to every review, negative ones included — factually and calmly. Future customers read the replies more closely than the stars,
• don’t buy reviews or reward people for five stars. Google removes such reviews and, for widespread violations, can block new reviews altogether.

Step 5: stay active

A profile that’s alive looks more credible — to customers and to the algorithm. Once a week or two, add a post (a new project, an offer, a seasonal tip), add fresh photos now and then, and answer questions in the Q&A section. It doesn’t need to take more than 15 minutes a week.

Why your website still matters

The profile and the website reinforce each other. Google checks whether the site you link to confirms what the profile says: the same name, address, phone number and range of services. A website with separate pages for the towns you serve, with service descriptions and case studies, gives the algorithm far more reasons to show you in a given location.

Then there’s speed and mobile — most “near me” searches happen on a phone, so a slow site wastes the clicks the profile has already earned.

The most common mistakes

• a profile created on an employee’s or agency’s private account, with no owner access,
• keywords added to the business name,
• two profiles for the same business (e.g. after a change of address) — the duplicate needs to be reported and removed,
• no replies to reviews, especially negative ones,
• a link to a website that doesn’t work on mobile or has no contact details.

If you don’t have time to run the profile regularly, we can do it for you as part of our Local visibility plan: new website content every month, posts and updates on the profile, and a quarterly visibility report. And if you still need a website for the profile to point to, configure your project in 60 seconds.