Google Business Profile Optimization: What Still Works in 2026

I am David Cragg. I have worked in search since 1990, and I have managed Google Business Profiles for local service businesses since the product was called Google Places. I run one client roster and I do the work myself, so the profiles I talk about here are ones I log into.

I rewrote this page in August 2026 because most of what is published about Google Business Profile is stale. Three tactics that show up in nearly every guide point at features Google has already switched off. If your current plan includes any of them, you are spending time on nothing.

If you only do five things, do these:

• Set the most specific primary category that matches how you actually earn money.
• Fill in every field. Hours, services, attributes, description, photos. Empty fields cost you queries.
• Ask every happy customer for a review, every week, with no script attached.
• Add photos monthly so the profile does not look abandoned.
• Make your website match the profile, name and address and phone, exactly.

Everything below is the detail behind those five, plus the parts that changed recently.

Google publishes this, which saves a lot of arguing. Local results come down to three things: relevance, distance, and prominence. Every tactic on this page is aimed at one of the three.

Start here, because if you follow an older guide you will waste an afternoon looking for buttons that no longer exist, and one piece of common advice can now get your reviews filtered.

The Q and A retirement matters more than it looks. Those questions did not disappear, they moved. An AI now answers them, and it reads your website to do it. That is why the FAQ section at the bottom of this page exists, and why I put a real FAQ block on every client page I build. If you want the AI to quote you, give it something of yours to quote.

An unverified profile has very little visibility. Verification is not optional and it is the step most new businesses stall on.

1. Claim or create the listing. Search your business name while signed into the Google account you want to own it. If a listing already exists, claim it rather than creating a second one. Duplicates split your reviews and confuse Google about which record is real.
2. Use your legal business name. Exactly as it appears on your signage and registration. Adding keywords to the name is the most common cause of suspension I see, and competitors report it.
3. Get verified. Postcard, phone, email, or video, depending on what Google offers you. Video verification is now common for new listings. Have your signage, vehicle, tools, and a piece of mail at the address ready before you start the recording.
4. Enter the name, address, and phone exactly once, then copy it. Whatever you type here is the master version. It has to appear identically on your website, your invoices, and every directory. Suite numbers and abbreviations count.
5. Set the service area if you travel to customers. Choose the option for delivering goods and services to customers, then list the cities you actually serve. Do not list forty cities you would drive to once. Overreaching here dilutes the profile.

Here is how I weight the elements when I audit a profile. It is not Google's published list. It is the order I work in, based on what changes when I change one thing at a time.

Write the description for a person, not a keyword tool

You get 750 characters. Say what you do, where you do it, and what makes you the obvious choice. Put the main service and the city in the first sentence, then write like a human. Stuffed descriptions read as spam to customers, and customers are the ones who decide whether to call.

List services one at a time

This is the most under used section in the whole product. A junk hauling client of mine has separate entries for hot tub removal, mattress disposal, and garage cleanout, because those are three different searches. A competitor with one entry called junk removal misses all three.

Add photos every month

Real photos of real jobs. Your truck, your crew, the before and after, the front of your building. Ten good photos beat fifty stock images. Set a monthly reminder, because photo uploads are the easiest habit to drop and the easiest to notice when it stops.

Keep hours accurate, including holidays

Wrong hours produce a specific kind of damage. Someone drives over, finds you closed, and leaves a one star review that has nothing to do with your work. Special hours take five minutes a quarter.

Reviews are the strongest signal you can influence. They are also the fastest way to get your profile flagged if you run the program the way it was commonly run two years ago.

Still allowed:

• Asking every customer, in person or by text or email, once the job is done.
• A review link on your invoice or a QR code on a card they take with them.
• Responding to every review, good or bad.

No longer allowed:

• Setting review quotas or contests for your staff.
• Asking a customer to mention a technician by name.
• Handing a customer your tablet to leave a review before they go.
• Screening for happy customers before you send the link.
• Offering a discount or a gift in exchange for a review.

The compliant version is also the durable one. Send the link after the customer has left, to their own phone, with no instructions about what to write. Reviews collected that way survive Google's filtering. Reviews collected on a shop tablet often do not, because they all come from one device.

Answer the bad ones in public, briefly, without arguing, and move the conversation offline. Prospects read your responses more carefully than they read the complaints.

If a profile is suspended, fix the cause before you appeal. Appealing without fixing anything nearly always fails and burns a cycle. Gather the license, a utility bill, photos of the signage, and vehicle wraps, then file the reinstatement request and expect it to take one to three weeks.

The profile can only take you so far. Past a couple of miles from your pin, the website is what carries you.

Three things matter most. Your name, address, and phone should sit in the footer of every page in the same format as the profile. You need a real page for each service you want to rank for and each city you actually serve, not one page listing thirty towns. And your site needs LocalBusiness structured data that ties the site and the profile together as one entity.

That last one is the piece most sites are missing. I cover it on the technical SEO page, along with crawling and Core Web Vitals. The city and service pages themselves are a writing problem more than a technical one, which I cover under SEO content writing. If the site itself is the bottleneck, that is a website build conversation.

This is what I run through when I take over a profile. Anything unchecked is work available to you.

Foundation

• Profile claimed and verified
• Legal business name, no added keywords
• Most specific primary category selected
• Secondary categories added, up to nine
• Address and service area set correctly for your business type
• Name, address, and phone identical to the website footer
• No duplicate listings anywhere

Completeness

• Description written, main service and city in the first sentence
• Every service listed as its own entry with a description
• Products added if you sell any
• Attributes set, including accessibility and payment options
• Opening date, hours, and holiday hours current
• Website link pointing to the most relevant page, not always the homepage

Ongoing

• Reviews requested from every customer, after they leave, no script
• Every review answered within a few days
• Photos added monthly
• One post per week
• Performance data reviewed monthly for which queries you are matching
• Categories rechecked a few times a year

Behind the profile

• LocalBusiness structured data on the site
• Name, address, and phone in the site footer sitewide
• A page per service and per city served
• An FAQ block answering what customers actually ask
• Citations consistent on the major directories and Apple Maps

Everything above is doable on your own. It takes a few hours to set up properly and about an hour a week to maintain. Most owners can do it. Fewer keep doing it in month seven, which is the part that actually decides who holds the top three.

If you want it handled, I take on a limited number of local clients at a time. What that costs and what is included is spelled out on the pricing page, with no contract attached. You can also look at case studies, or just get in touch and tell me what is happening with your listing.

Google Business Profile work sits inside the broader SEO services I provide, and it usually starts with an SEO audit so we both know what we are looking at.