Google Business Profile management, done properly.

What your Google Business Profile actually decides

Your profile is the listing that shows in Google Maps and in the block of three businesses that sits above the ordinary results. That block is the map pack. On a search with local intent, plumber near me, dentist East Dulwich, accountant open now, the map pack takes the top of the phone screen and the ten blue links start below the fold.

So the profile is not a supporting asset for the website. On a lot of local searches it is the whole result. A business with a well-run profile and an ordinary website usually takes more calls than a business with a beautiful website and a listing nobody has touched since 2019. If you have the second of those, our zero enquiries checklist covers the rest of the diagnosis.

Two things follow. First, the profile is worth an afternoon of proper work rather than five minutes. Second, it is a rented shopfront. Google can suspend it, and the reviews go with it when it does. That is why the suspension section further down is the longest one on this page.

The three things Google ranks on

Google publishes the answer, which is unusual and worth taking seriously. Local results are ranked on relevance, distance and prominence.

Relevance is how well the listing matches what was typed. In practice that is your primary category first, then your secondary categories and your services list.

Distance is how far the searcher is from the address you verified at. This is the proximity part, and you cannot argue with it. A business verified in East Dulwich ranks strongly in East Dulwich and fades as the searcher moves away. Nothing you type into the service area list changes that.

Prominence is how well known the business is. Mostly that means reviews: how many, how recent, what rating, and whether anybody wrote words as well as stars. Mentions and links elsewhere on the web feed into it too.

The useful conclusion is that one of the three is fixed and two are work. Relevance is a one-off afternoon of categorising things honestly. Prominence is forever. Distance is where you are, which is why towns twenty miles out get won on your website rather than on the map. That is the job our local-SEO work does alongside the profile.

Whitespark's Local Search Ranking Factors 2026, in which 47 local search specialists scored 187 factors, puts the primary category top of the entire list. Being open at the moment somebody searches came fifth. Overall profile completeness came sixteenth. That ordering matches what we see: get the category right, keep the hours honest, then spend the effort on reviews.

Setting the profile up, field by field

Before anything else, check you actually control it. Search your business name on a phone. If the listing shows an "Own this business?" link, it exists and nobody has claimed it, which means anybody could. If it opens into an owner view under an email address nobody uses any more, sort that first, because every other step needs owner access.

Google will usually ask you to verify by video. You record it live inside the Google app. You cannot film it earlier and upload the file, and an uploaded file is rejected. One unedited take, thirty seconds or more, showing three things: a street sign or landmark near the address you are registering, your actual kit or premises, and something only an owner could produce, such as a business bank statement or an insurance certificate. Other people's faces, account numbers and ID numbers on screen get it rejected. Google says review takes up to five working days, and you should not resubmit while you wait.

Then the fields, in the order they matter.

Two things the table does not cover. Work down the whole edit screen and fill in every field it offers: logo, cover photo, the year you started, attributes such as onsite services and online estimates, payment methods. Leave no blanks. Then open Google Maps on a phone, search yourself, and check the pin is sitting on the right building. Dragging it onto the correct roof takes five minutes and almost no listing ever has it done.

Categories, and why the primary one carries most of the weight

The primary category is the single heaviest field on the profile. It came first out of the 187 factors Whitespark's contributors scored, ahead of everything else on the listing.

The test is one sentence. Pick the category that finishes "this business IS a...". Not HAS, and not OFFERS. A pub that serves food is a Pub, not a Restaurant. A roofer who also clears gutters is a Roofing contractor, with Gutter cleaning service sitting underneath as a secondary. You have to choose from Google's list rather than invent one, so type your candidates into the box and see what comes back.

Secondary categories matter as well. They came eighth in the same Whitespark report. They matter when they are true. The honest test we use with clients: would you be comfortable if a Google reviewer rang and asked you to describe the last job you did in that category. If the answer is no, take it off. Padding the list breaks Google's own rule about using as few categories as it takes, and it is a suspension risk for a listing that gets looked at.

One practical note for a profile that has sat untouched for years. Change the primary category on its own, then leave the listing alone for a few days before the next edit. That is our caution rather than a published Google rule. A burst of edits on a dormant listing draws a look, and nobody has published proper numbers on how often that ends badly.

Reviews, and the UK law that changed in April 2025

Prominence is mostly reviews, so this is where the ongoing work goes. It is also the only part of profile management where doing it the fast way can cost you the listing and, since 2025, get you fined.

The law first. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 brought in a new unfair commercial practices regime on 6 April 2025. Writing or commissioning fake reviews is banned. So is publishing an incentivised review without disclosing the incentive. So is presenting review information in a way that misleads. The Competition and Markets Authority enforces this directly and can fine a business up to 10% of its global annual turnover, or an individual up to £300,000. It is not a platform policy you can shrug at, and it applies to a five-person firm exactly as it applies to a chain.

What that rules out permanently:

• Buying reviews from anybody, in any volume, ever.
• Reviews from staff, family, subcontractors, or mates in the trade.
• Offering a discount, a prize draw, a gift or a free extra in exchange for a review without disclosing it. Google prohibits incentivised reviews outright in any case.
• Review gating: any form, plugin or app that asks how the job went first, then sends the happy ones to Google and diverts the unhappy ones to a private inbox.

Google's own rules add more on top. Do not ask for a number of stars. Do not tell the customer what to write. Do not ask them to name a member of staff, which was standard advice for years and is now a policy violation. Do not hand somebody your phone or a tablet on site, because standing there while they type counts as pressure however friendly you are being.

What you are allowed to do is simple. On your own profile, go to Read reviews, then Get more reviews. Google gives you a short link and a QR code for exactly this purpose and its rules explicitly permit you to share them. Send every completed customer the same message with that link after you have left. You may ask for detail, a line about what the job was and which part of town they are in, because reviews with words in them count for more than a bare star rating and a one-star with no text often does not display at all. Asking for detail is not the same as telling somebody what to say. That distinction is the whole game.

Pace matters more than most owners expect. Sterling Sky (Review Posting Blocks Are Surging) documented a set of these blocks. In one, the review rate rose from a baseline of about 72 a month to 179, then 235, then 181 across three months. Google removed 342 of the 595 reviews generated, 57.5% of them, and blocked the listing from taking new reviews for thirty days. In every case they tracked, the block ran the full thirty days regardless of appeal. The three behaviours that went with it were reviews left while the customer was still inside the business, a QR code sitting on the counter, and bursts of ten or more reviews in a single day. Be honest about the size of it: five businesses over about two months is a small sample. Treat the numbers loosely and the pattern seriously.

A steady trickle beats a burst for two separate reasons. Google's policy targets unusual volumes and patterns rather than only individual bad reviews, so a burst puts your genuine reviews at risk alongside the rest. And twenty reviews that all arrived in one week and all say roughly the same thing read as bought to a customer, because that is what bought ones look like. A slightly lower average built one review at a time converts better than a suspiciously perfect one.

Reply to every review, good and bad, inside a few days. Keep it short, sign it with a first name, never argue, never offer money off in a reply, and never put a customer's address or phone number in one.

Posts, photos, and two features that no longer exist

Posts are a shop window, not a ranking lever. Sterling Sky ran a controlled nine-week test on three business profiles, publishing one post a week at each and tracking 441 keywords for every profile, and found posts moved rankings by nothing at all (Sterling Sky, Do Google Posts Impact Ranking?). They still earn a tap, so post when there is something real: a finished job, a gap in next week's diary, a seasonal thing. The limit is 1,500 characters and a post stays prominent for about a week. Nobody should be paying a monthly fee for weekly posts sold as a ranking service.

Photos are worth more than posts, because they are what a customer looks at while deciding whether to ring. Your own jobs and premises, before and after, in focus, no heavy filters. A photo that fails Google's technical requirements does not throw an error, it silently never appears, which is why the specifications are in the table above. Allow 24 to 48 hours for one to show up. Google publishes no target for how often to add them, so any number you have been given is invented. Our working bar is a decent handful at the start and a few more each month when good ones have been taken.

Two features people still get sold that no longer exist. Google's own messaging stopped taking new chats in July 2024 and the history was deleted in August 2024, so ignore any advice about a message us on Google button. What replaced it is a WhatsApp or text link under Edit profile, then Contact, then Chat. WhatsApp links have to be in the shape https://wa.me/ followed by the full number with the country code, no spaces and no plus sign. If you add both WhatsApp and text, only text shows.

The second is the Q&A section. Google shut down the system behind it in November 2025 and started removing it from listings in December 2025, so anything seeded there is work you may watch disappear. The questions themselves are still worth having, just somewhere else. Take the fifteen things customers ask you on the phone every week, put them on your own website with straight answers underneath, and mark them up properly. That version lasts, and it is the version AI assistants can actually read and quote.

What gets a profile suspended, and how to get it reinstated

Suspension is the risk that makes everything above worth doing carefully. A suspended profile disappears from Maps and from the map pack, and the reviews disappear with it. Every other field on the listing is data you could retype in an evening. Reviews are months of work.

The common causes, in rough order of how often we see them:

• Keywords in the business name. "Smith Plumbing | Emergency Plumber Dulwich" instead of "Smith Plumbing". You will see competitors doing it and it does appear to work. It is also banned outright and it is the fastest way to lose a listing you spent two years building reviews on.
• An address the business does not occupy. A virtual office, a mailbox at a shop, a PO box, or a relative's address in a better postcode. Google rules PO boxes and remote mailboxes out completely, and virtual offices unless they are staffed during your opening hours with your signage on them.
• A home address left showing on a business that only ever works at the customer's premises. Google's rule is to remove it and use service areas instead.
• Two profiles for one business, usually because somebody created a second one instead of claiming the auto-generated original.
• Category or service claims for work the business does not do.
• Review manipulation, including the volume pattern described above.

Getting back in works like this. Fix the underlying cause first, because an appeal on an unchanged profile fails. Then file a reinstatement request with your evidence ready before you start: a utility bill or bank statement in the business name at the address, business registration, photographs of signage, an insurance certificate. Expect weeks rather than days. Nobody, ourselves included, can promise reinstatement. The decision sits with a Google reviewer you will never speak to, and a firm quoting you odds on it is quoting a number it invented.

If a competitor is stuffing keywords into their name and taking your work, the route is Google's Business Redressal Complaint Form. Send a screenshot of their listing, the Maps link, and something showing their real trading name such as their own website or their van. Expect it to take more than a month and to sometimes go nowhere.

What we do for you, and at which tier

Google Business Profile maintenance is in every tier. It is not an add-on, there is no separate management fee, and the website build and hosting sit in the same monthly price. Specialist agencies selling profile management alone quote £150 to £500 a month in the quotes we see across the UK market, an observed range rather than a published statistic, and usually for less work than this.

Essentials, £49 a month. We audit the profile against everything on this page, correct the categories, write the services list and the description, set the service area or hide the address, and fix the map pin. After that we keep it current: hours, seasonal hours, contact details, and the website link pointed at the right page with tracking on it.

Growth, £79 a month. Everything above, plus we publish photos you send us, put up a post when you have something real to show, and build the local pages on your website that win the towns the map pack will never give you at your distance. We also write you a review request message and tell you exactly when to send it.

Pro, £200 a month. Everything above, plus a monthly report showing profile views, calls, direction requests and website taps against the previous month, so you can see what the listing is actually worth. Lead capture on the website is set up and maintained so the calls the profile sends you do not fall through the floor.

What we do not do, so nobody is surprised. We do not write reviews or arrange for them to be written. We do not run review-gating tools. We do not sell weekly posts as a ranking service, because the Sterling Sky test says they do not rank. We cannot promise reinstatement of a suspended profile. And we do not take ownership of your profile: you add us as a manager from your own account and you can remove us in two taps.

We are based in East Dulwich, London, and work with clients across the UK. The profile work is identical wherever you are, because it happens inside the profile rather than on your doorstep. The areas we do cover in person are on our London and Surrey pages. Full pricing detail is on the pricing page, and the wider service is on the services page. For a worked example of the same approach on a real business, one we run ourselves, see the Sameday Jetwash case study.