- Google ranks local listings on three criteria it documents: relevance, distance and prominence; none of them can be bought.
- Your business's real name, the right primary category and accurate opening hours count for more than any clever trick.
- Ask every customer for a review, reply to each one, and keep the same name, address and phone number everywhere.
The map comes before your website
On a phone, a search such as ‘bakery near me’ or ‘solicitor Arras’ does not open a list of websites first. It shows a map, a few pins and a handful of listings, with their rating, their opening hours and a button to call. Many people make their choice at that point, without scrolling down to the ordinary results. These listings come from Google Business Profile, the free tool in which a business says who it is, where it is and when it is open.
The profile sometimes exists without your having created it: Google can open one from what it finds, and anyone can suggest an edit to it. Unclaimed, it remains exposed to other people's suggestions: wrong opening hours, a photo taken on a day of building work, an approximate category. Claiming it means taking back control of what is said about you at the moment someone is looking for you. Google then asks for proof that the business really is yours, in ways that vary from case to case; see it through to the end.
In Japan, the noren, the fabric curtain hung across a shop's entrance, says before anything else that the house is open and what can be found inside. Your business profile plays that role on the map. You look after it as you would a shopfront: without artifice, with accurate information, keeping it tidy week after week.
How Google ranks local results
Google documents three criteria for ranking local listings. Relevance first: does your profile match what the person typed? Then distance: how far are you from the place named in the search, or from the person themselves if they named none. Finally prominence: what Google knows about you across the web, the sites and directories that mention you, your reviews, how many there are and their rating.
These three criteria do not leave the same room for manoeuvre. Distance cannot be negotiated: a florist on the far side of town will struggle to rank above a fellow florist on the corner when the search is made right outside that corner shop, and rightly so. Relevance, on the other hand, depends almost entirely on you: on the category you choose, the services you declare, the description, and consistency with your website. Prominence builds more slowly, through reviews and mentions, but it does build.
Name and category, the two settings that matter most
The name on the profile must be the real name of the business, as it appears on the shopfront, the invoices and the official documents. Yet it is a rule often broken. Adding ‘cheap plumber’ or the name of the town after your name looks clever, and sometimes seems to work for a while; but it goes against Google's guidelines and can lead to the profile being suspended, which may then disappear from the map until the matter is resolved. If the town or the trade genuinely form part of the name painted on your frontage, nothing stands in the way; otherwise, they have no place in the name.
The primary category is one of the most decisive settings on the whole profile. It tells Google which searches you answer: ‘Bakery’ is not ‘Pastry shop’, ‘Pizza restaurant’ is not ‘Italian restaurant’. Choose the one that describes the heart of your business, the one that would make a passer-by say ‘it's a…’, not the one you think people search for most. Secondary categories then add the real activities that complement the first, never one that matches nothing you do.
To check your choice, type on a phone the searches a customer would make to find you. Look at the category shown beneath the name of the listings at the top: it tells you how Google files your trade in your town. A profile filed in the wrong drawer can be perfectly filled in and still stay invisible.
Every field of the profile, and how to fill it in
Once the name and category are set, the rest is filled in in a simple order. Each field answers a question a customer asks before travelling or calling; an empty field is a question left unanswered. Take the time, once, to fill everything in carefully: upkeep will then ask far less of you.
- The address or the service area
A business that receives customers shows its exact address. A tradesperson who goes to their customers can hide the address and declare the area they serve: Google provides for this, and it is more accurate than an address where nobody is received.
- Phone number and website
The number is the one that is actually answered, at the hours shown. The link leads to the right page: the home page, or the page for the location concerned if you have several.
- Opening hours, regular and special
Special hours cover bank holidays, annual leave, a closure for works. Entering them in advance spares you the customer who finds the door shut after trusting the map, and who remembers it.
- The description
Up to 750 characters to say what you do, for whom, and what sets you apart, in plain sentences. Put neither links nor current offers in it: the description presents the business, while posts carry the news.
- Services and attributes
List your real services under their usual names. Attributes cover the rest (wheelchair access, outdoor seating, contactless payment, depending on the trade): tick only what is true.
- Photos
Real photos: the frontage as seen from the street, the interior, the team, your work. They help customers make up their minds, then recognise you as they arrive.
The booking link and posts
If you work by appointment, the profile can carry a link for booking or reservations: the shortest path between a search and a customer entered in your diary. Any online booking tool can be connected to it; for trades that work by appointment, our plans include our own, Digital Calendar, built into the website and then linked to the profile. Point that link to the booking page itself, not to the website's home page.
Posts announce news, an offer or an event on the profile, and show that the business is alive. A steady rhythm, however spaced out, on real subjects is worth more than a burst with no sequel. Take down an expired offer in time: still on display, it does more harm than no offer at all.
Reviews: asking for them, replying to them
Reviews count twice: in the prominence Google takes into account, and in the decision of the person hesitating between two addresses. It is therefore legitimate to ask for them, from all your customers, without sorting out in advance those from whom you expect a good rating. A word at the till, a QR code on the counter, a line in the confirmation email are enough; the profile's management area provides a direct link to the review form.
Google's guidelines prohibit offering anything in return for a review (a discount, a gift), buying reviews, or posting reviews about your own business, whether yourself or through your staff. In France, publishing or arranging the publication of fake reviews is moreover a misleading commercial practice, governed by the French Consumer Code. Google can remove reviews it judges suspicious; and a customer who discovers the deception does not come back.
Replying to each one
Reply to every review, good and bad alike. To a positive review, sincere and specific thanks are enough; the same formula pasted under every comment is quickly noticed. To a negative review, reply calmly, without lengthy self-justification or a quarrelsome tone: acknowledge what can be acknowledged, offer to continue the exchange privately, and leave it there. Your reply is addressed less to its author than to everyone who will read it afterwards.
A reply to a review is written for the next customer, not to win the argument.
What a reply must never contain
- No personal data: not the customer's full name, nor what they bought, nor the date of their visit.
- For a medical practice or a solicitor, the caution is twofold: confirming that someone is your client may already disclose information covered by professional secrecy.
- No reply written in the heat of the moment: reread it the next day, or have someone else read it.
The profile and the website must say the same thing
Google does not rely on your profile alone: it takes account of what it finds elsewhere on the web, your website, directories, the pages that mention you. If the name, address and phone number are identical everywhere, these sources confirm one another. If they diverge, Google has to guess which is right, and so does a customer. This is known as ‘NAP’ consistency, for name, address, phone: the term is technical, the principle is not.
On your website, these three details appear at least in the footer and on the contact page, written exactly as on the profile. You can go further with structured data: a short block of code, invisible to visitors, in the schema.org LocalBusiness format, which describes the business for search engines (name, address, phone, opening hours). It helps Google connect the profile and the website, provided it matches exactly what the page displays. The article on the title, the description and the H1 shows where this block sits in a page.
Finally, the page the profile points to must keep its promise: the address, the opening hours and the way to reach you or book, visible at a glance. If it is slow to appear or buries them under a video, the customer goes back to the map and chooses the business next door. The profile brings them to your door; it is up to the website to open it, and that is the whole purpose of our web design work.
Looking after the profile over time
A profile is never finished. Opening hours change with the seasons, a service is added, reviews come in. Google can also change a detail on its own, at a member of the public's suggestion; you are generally notified, but you still have to read those notifications. The only way to keep a profile accurate is to look at it regularly, as you would walk round your shop before opening.
A simple rhythm
- Every week: read the new reviews and reply to each one.
- Every month: check the coming opening hours, add a few recent photos, post some news if you have any.
- Before every bank holiday or period of leave: enter the special hours.
- With every real change: update the profile, the website and the main directories on the same day.
Upkeep also shows what the profile is producing. The management area offers its own statistics (the searches that displayed the profile, calls, direction requests, clicks through to the website), which tell you whether changes are having an effect. Look at them over several months rather than from one week to the next: a profile is judged over time, like a reputation. In-depth work on local search, profile and website together, lies at the heart of our search discipline.
What you can do this week
Tick as you go: nothing is saved, it is simply a reminder.
Founder and director of Digital Air Media, a digital creation house opened in Paris in 2017. He writes here what the house applies to its own pages before offering it to others.