The Google Business Profile checklist

Most profiles are half-finished. Not broken — just set up once, years ago, and never touched.

This is the list I work through. It takes about an hour the first time. Nothing here costs money.

Start here: the two that matter most

☐ 1. Fix your primary category

This is the highest-leverage field on the entire profile, and most businesses set it once without thinking.

Different categories surface in different searches. “Website designer” and “Internet marketing service” are not interchangeable, and neither are “Plumber” and “Plumbing supply store.”

Pick the one that matches what people search when they want what you actually sell. Then leave it alone for about 90 days and see what happens. Changing it repeatedly teaches you nothing and looks unstable.

☐ 2. Add every relevant secondary category

Add every category you’d genuinely take the job for. Only those — irrelevant categories are a guideline problem, not a growth hack.

Your basic information

☐ 3. Business name — exactly as you trade

No cities. No services. No taglines. Miller Plumbing, not Miller Plumbing — Emergency Plumber Murfreesboro TN 24/7.

Keyword stuffing here is the most common cause of suspension. If someone added those words to help you rank, they hurt you instead.

☐ 4. Address — shown or hidden, deliberately

Customers come to you → show it. You go to them → hide it and set a service area.

Publishing a home address you can’t substantiate as a business location is a leading suspension cause for contractors. → How to run a profile without showing your home address

☐ 5. Service area — honest, not aspirational

Your service area does not determine where you rank. Listing fifteen counties does not put you in fifteen counties. It tells customers where you’ll travel and tells Google you’re a service-area business.

List the places you’d genuinely drive to.

☐ 6. Phone number — consistent everywhere

The same number, formatted the same way, on your website, your profile, and every directory.

☐ 7. Website URL — one version

Pick https://yoursite.com or https://www.yoursite.com and use that exact form everywhere. Mixing them creates uncertainty you don’t need.

☐ 8. Hours — accurate, including holidays

Wrong hours generate one-star reviews from people who showed up to a locked door. Set holiday hours in advance.

☐ 9. Opening date — your real one

Don’t backdate to look established.

The fields most people skip

☐ 10. Business description — all of it

Around 750 characters. Say what you do, where you do it, and what makes you different. Plain language, no marketing filler. If you have prices you’re willing to publish, put a number in — it’s concrete, it’s rare, and it gets quoted.

☐ 11. Every service, with its own description

Empty service fields do nothing. Fill each one and describe it in the words customers use — “not showing up on Google Maps” beats “local visibility optimization” every time.

☐ 12. Products, if they apply

Underused by most local businesses and it’s free space on your profile.

☐ 13. Attributes

Family-owned, veteran-owned, online appointments, accessibility, languages. Some of these appear as filters customers actually use.

☐ 14. Appointment or booking link, if you have one

Photos

☐ 15. A real photo of you or your team

For a small local business this is often the best-performing image on the profile. People hire people.

☐ 16. Your logo and a cover photo

☐ 17. Ten or more photos of real work

Your jobs, your building, your van, your equipment. Not stock. A stock photo of someone else’s kitchen helps nobody and readers can tell.

☐ 18. Add new photos monthly

Twenty seconds of effort, and recency is a signal.

Ongoing — the part that compounds

☐ 19. Post weekly

One post, twenty minutes, tied to something real — a job you finished, a question you keep getting, a page you published. Google Posts is fully supported and it’s now the main way to put your own words on your profile.

(Note: Google removed the public Q&A feature from Business Profiles in late 2025. If you’re looking for where to answer common customer questions, the answer now is an FAQ section on your own website — that’s what the AI-generated answers in Maps read from.)

☐ 20. Ask every customer for a review

In person, at the moment they’re happiest, with a short link and a QR code. Never buy, trade, or incentivize them. → How to get more Google reviews

☐ 21. Reply to every review within a couple of days

Real sentences that mention the service and the town. Not “Thanks!”

☐ 22. Check your profile monthly for user edits

Google lets the public suggest changes to your listing — hours, address, even permanent closure. These go live without asking you. Check monthly.

Consistency beyond the profile

☐ 23. Identical name, address and phone everywhere

Website, Facebook, Yelp, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, chamber listings, industry directories. Not similar — identical. Every variation makes Google less certain it knows who you are.

☐ 24. Find and resolve duplicate listings

Search your business name, your old business names, and any previous addresses. Duplicates compete with each other and confuse Google. Keep the one with the reviews.

☐ 25. Connect your website properly

Your profile should link to your site, and your site should identify the same business — same name, same phone, same address handling. Structured data helps here, and it matters more if there are similarly named businesses in your town.

Things that will get you suspended

Worth reading even if you skip everything else:

• Keywords in the business name
• A virtual office, mailbox service, or address you don’t operate from
• A home address displayed when it should be hidden
• Duplicate listings you created rather than claimed
• Bought, traded, or incentivized reviews
• Editing name, address and category all at once — looks like an account takeover
• Categories for services you don’t provide

→ If you’re already suspended, start here

What this checklist won’t fix

Being honest about the ceiling.

Distance. If you’re twenty minutes outside town, businesses closer to the searcher have an advantage you cannot buy your way out of.

Review count. If an established competitor has been collecting reviews for years and has well over a hundred, a perfect profile doesn’t close that this year.

A business Google won’t list. Purely online businesses with no customer contact and no service area may not qualify at all.

What this checklist does fix is relevance — the part fully in your control, and the part most of your competitors have neglected. Combined with steady reviews and consistency everywhere else, that’s the whole game.

Want it done for you?

An hour of your time and this page is genuinely enough to do it yourself.

If you’d rather have it handled — profile managed, weekly posts, reviews tracked and replied to, a monthly report in plain English — that’s the Grow plan at $275 a month. No contract, cancel any time.

If your profile is suspended or won’t verify, that’s GBP Rescue, $450 — $225 to start, $225 only if it comes back, free diagnosis first.

Call or text 615-580-0699 · trey.surles@borodigital.com

Murfreesboro, Rutherford County, and out through Warren, Cannon, and Coffee.