Most local businesses I look at have a Google Business Profile, and most of them stopped after the name, the address and one photo. The profile exists, it looks finished, and it is doing a fraction of what it could. I spent this week filling out my own properly, field by field, so here is what each one actually does.
The primary category does most of the work
Of everything on the profile, the primary category is the single field with the most weight. It is how Google decides which searches you are a candidate for at all. Get it wrong and the rest of the profile is well-organised evidence for the wrong question.
The part people miss is that you get more than one. You pick one primary and up to nine additional, and they are not interchangeable: the primary carries far more weight, and the extras exist to catch the searches that are genuinely you but are not your main trade. I run two on mine, because “website designer” and the SEO side of the work are different searches by different people with different problems.
Adding categories that are not really what you do is worse than leaving them empty. It dilutes the signal, and it puts you in front of people whose enquiry you then have to turn down.
Services are searchable text, not decoration
Under each category you can list individual services, each with its own short description. This is the field I see empty most often, and it is the one that surprised me most when I filled it in.
The services list is not a menu for people already reading your profile. It is text Google can match against what someone typed. Somebody searching for a specific job is not searching your category name, they are searching the job: not “website designer” but the thing they need done to their site this week.
I ended up with fifteen, split across the two categories, each with a sentence describing what it involves. That took an afternoon and it is the closest thing on the profile to free keyword coverage. Write the descriptions in the words a customer would use, not the words the industry uses.
Service area or address, and why the distinction matters
Google treats a business you visit and a business customers come to as different things. If you go to the customer, set a service area and the profile behaves accordingly. If they come to you, the address is what matters.
Being vague here costs you. A service area set to something enormous and hopeful does not extend your reach, it just weakens the local signal everywhere inside it. Mine is set to the places I actually work, which for me is Silang and the surrounding parts of Cavite, and that is a more useful claim than the whole of Luzon.
The fields that quietly gate everything else
Some fields do not seem to be doing anything until they are missing.
- Hours. Without them, the profile cannot say whether you are open, and “open now” is a filter people actually use.
- A phone number. On a phone, the call button is the whole point of the profile. A profile with no number is asking for an extra step at the exact moment someone had decided to act.
- Verification. An unverified profile can be edited by other people and cannot use half the features. This is worth checking rather than assuming: the dashboard says plainly whether you manage the profile.
- Photos at the right size. Google wants square images around 720 pixels for the logo slot. My own headshot was 300 pixels and had to be redone, which is a small thing that had been quietly failing for months.
Posts expire, and that is the point
You can post updates to a profile the way you would to a social account, and unlike a social post these age out of the profile after a while. That sounds like a downside and is actually the useful part: a profile with a recent post is visibly a business that still exists.
I post fortnightly, scheduled in advance, because the honest alternative was posting three times in a good week and then nothing for two months. The cadence matters more than the individual post.
One warning from doing this: editing a scheduled post can send it back for review, and it will sit as pending rather than scheduled until that clears. Worth knowing before you tidy up a typo the day before it goes out.
The one field you cannot fill in yourself
Everything above is work you can do in an afternoon. Reviews are not, and they carry more weight with the person reading than anything you write about yourself. Google’s own dashboard puts a number on it: profiles with five or more reviews can get up to twice as many customers.
The only legitimate way to fill it is to ask people you have actually worked for, using the profile’s own review link. Anything faster than that risks the whole profile, not just the reviews, and a profile is not a thing worth gambling.
What a profile cannot do
A complete profile makes you findable for searches you were already plausible for. It does not make a slow site fast, it does not fix a page that gives a visitor no reason to call, and it will not carry a business whose website loses people in the first few seconds.
The profile and the site do different halves of the same job. The profile gets you into the list. The site decides what happens next, which comes back to the same technical ground as why your WordPress site feels slow.
If you want to know which half is costing you more, that is what a performance audit is for, and the local search side is the other half of the same conversation.