Google Business Profile: the 12 settings that actually matter

For a local business, your Google Business Profile often gets more views than your website. It is free, it takes an afternoon to set up properly, and the overwhelming majority of profiles are incomplete — which is exactly why finishing yours is worth doing this week.

The setup, in order

1. Claim and verify. Search your business name, click "Claim this business", and complete verification. Video verification is now common; have your signage, equipment and premises ready to film.
2. Primary category. The single highest-impact field on the profile. Pick the most specific category that describes your main service, not the broadest.
3. Secondary categories. Add every category you genuinely serve. Do not pad — irrelevant categories dilute the primary signal.
4. Business name. Your real, registered trading name. Stuffing keywords into it ("Leesburg Plumbing & Drain Cleaning Experts") is against Google's guidelines and gets listings suspended.
5. Address or service area. If customers come to you, show the address. If you travel to them, hide it and set service areas by town or ZIP. Do not do both.
6. Hours. Set regular hours and, importantly, special hours for holidays. Google demotes profiles it believes have wrong hours.
7. Phone number. A local number outperforms a toll-free one. Use the same number that appears on your website.
8. Services and products. Add each service with a description. Almost nobody fills this in, and it is indexed text describing exactly what you sell.
9. Business description. 750 characters. Write it for a person, mention what you do and where, and do not keyword-stuff it.
10. Photos. Ten minimum, real ones. Exterior, interior, team, vehicles, finished work. Add a few every month — freshness counts.
11. Attributes. Wheelchair accessible, women-owned, veteran-led, free estimates, online appointments. These appear as filters in Google Maps searches.
12. Messaging and booking. Turn messaging on only if someone will actually answer it within a few hours. A slow reply rate hurts you.

Keeping it alive

A profile that never changes slowly loses ground to one that does.

• Post weekly. Offers, updates, finished jobs, seasonal reminders. Posts are short and take five minutes.
• Answer the Q&A. Anyone can ask a question on your profile, and anyone can answer it. Seed it yourself with the questions you actually get asked, and answer them.
• Request reviews steadily. A few a month, every month, beats a burst followed by silence.
• Reply to every review within a couple of days, positive and negative. A calm, specific reply to a bad review reads better to future customers than the review itself.

What to watch

The profile's own insights tell you how many people called, requested directions, or clicked through to your website, and which search terms found you. Those are real outcomes. Track them monthly and you will see quickly whether the work is paying.

This is the foundation of every local campaign we run — more detail on our SEO service page, or read the wider Loudoun County local SEO checklist.