What is Google Business Profile?
Google Business Profile (GBP) is the listing behind the panel you see when you search for a business by name: the map pin, the hours, the phone number, the photographs, the reviews, the button that says directions or call. Until 2021 it was called Google My Business. The listing is free, Google creates one for most businesses whether they ask or not, and claiming it is how you take control of what it says.
It is also the main input to the local pack, the three map results Google shows for searches with local intent. For a business that serves a place, a complete, accurate and active profile is the single most important piece of local SEO.
Why it matters
Why Google Business Profile matters
For many searches, the profile is the website. People searching for a studio, a store or a restaurant on their phone see the panel, read the reviews, check the hours and call, without ever visiting a web page. If the profile is wrong, they call a dead number or arrive at an old address, and the first impression is a mistake you did not know you were making.
It is also where reputation lives in public. Reviews appear on the profile, your replies appear beneath them, and the star rating sits beside your name in every local result. Google's local ranking depends on relevance, distance and prominence, and the profile feeds all three: categories and descriptions for relevance, the address for distance, reviews and activity for prominence.
In practice
How Google Business Profile works in practice
- 01
Claim the profile and verify it, which may mean a postcard, a phone call, a video or a document depending on the business. Then fill in everything: the exact trading name (no keywords added), the primary category and the secondary ones, the address or service area, hours including holidays, phone, website, a description written for a person, and the attributes that apply. Add photographs of the place, the people and the work, and keep adding them.
- 02
Then keep it alive. Reply to every review, including the bad ones, briefly and without arguing. Post updates, offers and events. Answer the questions people ask on the listing before someone else does. Keep the name, address and phone number identical to what appears on your website and in every other directory. Read the performance report to see which searches surface the profile and what people do next, and fix what the data shows: the wrong category, a missing service, hours that do not match the door.
Watch out
What people get wrong about Google Business Profile
Stuffing keywords into the business name. It is against Google's guidelines, it can get the profile suspended, and it looks desperate beside the real name. The second mistake is setting it up and walking away: profiles with recent photographs, replies and posts outrank identical profiles that went quiet years ago. The third is ignoring reviews, or worse, buying them. Google removes fake reviews and penalizes profiles caught with them, and the one-star review you did not answer says more to the next customer than the five you did.
