There is a version of Google Business Profile advice that is all vague encouragement: be active, be engaging, delight your customers. This is not that. Below is what to actually do, in the order that matters, with the specific mistakes that quietly cost businesses visibility.
Start with the category, because everything else is downstream
Your primary category is the single most influential field on the profile. It determines which searches you are even eligible to appear for. Get it wrong and the rest of your work is optimising a listing Google is showing to the wrong people.
Pick the category that describes what the business fundamentally is, not what it also sells. A bakery that serves coffee is a bakery. A pub that does food is a pub, unless food is genuinely the main event, in which case it is a restaurant. When you are torn, look at what the businesses already ranking for your target search have chosen.
Then add secondary categories for the things you genuinely offer. Each one widens your eligibility. But adding categories you do not belong in is a policy violation and it dilutes the relevance signal you are trying to build, so accuracy beats reach here.
Complete every field, including the boring ones
Completeness is one of the few inputs entirely within your control, and it affects both ranking and the human decision.
- Description. 750 characters. Write it for a person deciding whether to come in, using the words customers actually use. Not a keyword list.
- Hours. Including holiday hours, set weeks ahead. See below, because this is the expensive one.
- Phone. A number that a human answers. Tracking numbers are allowed but keep the main number consistent with your website.
- Website. Point multi-location businesses at the specific location page, not the homepage.
- Services and products. Underused, and it is the natural place for the specific things people search for.
- Attributes. Wheelchair accessible, outdoor seating, free wifi, women-led. These feed the filters people use in Maps.
- Opening date. Small signal, costs nothing.
Hours: the most expensive small mistake in local search
Wrong hours generate a specific and avoidable kind of one-star review: somebody drove across town, found the door locked, and is now writing about it. That review will still be on your profile in three years. The edit that would have prevented it took ninety seconds.
Set special hours for every public holiday, in advance, for every location. If you trade past midnight, check that your overnight hours are entered correctly, because a venue trading until 2am can easily end up displaying "Closed" during its busiest window.
Photos: what people actually look at
Watch somebody choose a restaurant on their phone. They look at the photos before they read a single word. Profiles with recent, real photos read as businesses that are trading; profiles with nothing but a street-view thumbnail read as businesses that may have closed.
Cover the basics: logo, cover image, exterior so people recognise the place when they arrive, interior, team, and product or work. Then add a few more every month. Do not use stock photography, and do not add photos with text plastered across them - they look like ads and they perform like ads.
Posts: what to publish, and what gets rejected
There are three post types and each has its own fields. What's New for general updates, Offer for a promotion with a validity window and optional coupon code, and Event for something with a start and end time.
A workable rhythm is about one a week. Consistency beats volume: four posts a month, every month, is worth more than twelve in one week followed by a quiet quarter.
Things that get posts rejected, in rough order of how often they catch people out:
- Promoting regulated products - tobacco, vape, alcohol, cannabis, firearms. The business is allowed on Maps; promoting the product in a post is not.
- Phone numbers in the post body.
- Prices or discount claims where they are not permitted for your category.
- Low quality, heavily overlaid or blurry images.
- Links that do not match the business.
- Anything reading as spam: excessive capitals, repeated punctuation, keyword stuffing.
Google moderates after submission, and by default nobody tells you when something was rejected. If you post and never check, you may have been publishing nothing for months.
Reviews: the part that decides the sale
Getting them
Ask every customer, in the same way, every time. That sentence contains the whole policy. Google prohibits offering incentives for reviews, and it prohibits review gating - surveying customers first and only inviting the happy ones to Google. Both are detectable and both put your listing at risk.
A steady trickle beats a burst. Forty reviews arriving in one week after eighteen months of silence looks exactly like what it usually is.
Answering them
Reply to all of them, positive included. The reply is not for the reviewer, who has moved on. It is for the next person reading your profile, who is deciding whether to trust you and who will read a two-year-old complaint alongside how you handled it.
A structure that works for negative reviews:
- Thank them by name, even at one star.
- Acknowledge the specific thing they raised, so it is obvious a person read it.
- Say what changes, in one sentence. Not an excuse, not a policy explanation.
- Offer a direct contact and move it offline.
Never argue the facts in public, even when you are right - the reader sees a business fighting a customer. Never confirm private details about anybody, which matters enormously for medical, dental and legal practices. And never paste an identical reply under twenty reviews; Google stacks them and the repetition is obvious.
Questions and answers
The Q&A section on your profile is public and anyone can answer, including people who do not work for you and have no idea. Seed it yourself: post the ten questions you are asked every week, and answer them from the business account. Then check it monthly, because a wrong answer sitting there unchallenged is worse than an empty section.
Messaging
If you turn messaging on, answer it. Response time is visible, and a slow one is worse than not offering the channel at all. If nobody can commit to checking it, leave it off.
The routine that holds it together
None of this is difficult. It fails because it is nobody's specific job. A workable cadence:
- Weekly: reply to new reviews, publish one post.
- Monthly: add a few photos, check Q&A, review your performance data and the searches bringing people in.
- Quarterly: re-check categories, refresh the description, audit the whole profile for drift.
- Before every holiday: set special hours.
When you have more than one location
Everything above is a habit at one location and a logistics problem at ten. The work does not get more complex, it gets multiplied: twenty logins to publish one post, twenty profiles to check for new reviews, twenty hours updates before every public holiday.
That is the specific problem GBP Manager solves. One compose screen that publishes to every location with per-location delivery status, one review inbox for the whole estate, bulk hours and contact edits with field-level control, and a Visibility Score per location that tells you which of these best practices you are actually failing at.