Google Business Profile: Get Found Locally and Win Inquiries

Why does the Google Business Profile decide local inquiries?

Someone searches for “electrician emergency service” or “tax advisor for trade businesses” together with their town. Before they see a single website, the search engine shows them a map with three businesses, stars, opening hours and a call button. Many decide right there whom to contact. Your website only gets to see these people if your profile made them curious.

The Google Business Profile, formerly Google My Business, is your company’s listing in Google Search and Google Maps. It is free. That is exactly why it is often treated like a phone book entry: created once, then forgotten. The opening hours have been wrong since the move, and the last reply to a review is two years old.

For businesses whose customers come from the region, the profile is not a sideshow. In the article SEO for small and midsize businesses it appears as one building block of local search. This article covers the whole path, and the guiding question is: how does the business profile become a reliable source of local inquiries? To answer it, we first introduce the shop door rule, then go through setup, reviews, and replies, and end with measuring the path from view to inquiry and a 15-minute weekly upkeep routine.

A business profile is a shop door on the internet. If you unlock it, you should be standing behind it.

The shop door rule: what a claimed profile promises

Claiming a profile means proving to the platform that you own the business. After that you can change details, upload photos and reply to reviews. That sounds like a pure advantage. A recent study shows there is a catch.

Lee, Lysyakov and Rui (2026) studied newly opened, popular restaurants around the 200 largest U.S. cities on the review platform Yelp. They compared 627 pairs of similar businesses, one of which claimed its page and one of which did not, and analyzed around 140,000 reviews. To measure the pure effect of claiming, they excluded businesses that replied to reviews within the first 90 days afterwards.

After claiming, the average rating fell by 10.3 percent. There were more one-star and fewer five-star reviews, the bad reviews got longer, and customers addressed the owner directly about service problems more often. The authors explain it this way: a claimed profile shows that the owner is reading along. Dissatisfied customers then tend to write instead of quietly staying away, because they expect someone to react. In their additional analyses, owner responses partly softened the effect.

The limitations are clear: restaurants, one platform, one country. Still, a rule for your business follows from it, which I call the shop door rule. Taking over the profile is right, because an unattended profile does not disappear, it just gets filled by others. But by unlocking the door you take on the duty to be available. Whoever takes over the profile needs a responsible person and a fixed time for replies from day one.

How do you set up the business profile completely?

The search engine can only match you to searches that fit your details. Incomplete profiles therefore lose twice: they appear less often, and when they do appear, they convince less. Go through the details in this order.

1. Name exactly as used in daily life

   The name in the profile matches the actual company name on the sign and letterhead. Adding search terms to the name violates Google’s guidelines and can lead to suspension.

2. Choose the primary category carefully

   The primary category strongly determines which searches you appear in. Choose the one that most precisely describes your most important service and add a few fitting secondary categories.

3. Address or service area

   If customers visit you, the address goes in. If you travel to the customer, you enter a service area and hide the address.

4. Contact and hours

   Phone number, website and opening hours match the website exactly. You enter public holidays and company vacations in advance.

5. Services and description

   Each important service is listed individually in the profile, in the words customers use. The description says in a few sentences whom you serve and how.

6. Real photos

   Team, vehicles, premises, finished work. No stock images. Photos show that you really exist.

Name, address and phone number must read the same everywhere: in the profile, on the website, in the legal notice and in business directories. Variations such as “St.” and “Street” are harmless; an old phone number or a former company name are not.

How do you get more genuine reviews?

For many searchers, reviews are the most important part of the profile. Most satisfied customers, however, write nothing on their own. They need to be asked, at the right moment and with little effort.

• The right moment is shortly after a visible success: at acceptance, after handover, when the customer thanks you.
• Little effort means a direct link to the review form, by email or as a QR code on the invoice.
• An honest request asks for a review, not for five stars.
• Fixed responsibility ensures the request goes out after every job and not only when someone happens to remember.

A side finding from review research argues for a steady flow rather than one-off campaigns. In two experiments, Shin and Xiang (2024) showed that people looking for a provider nearby at short notice give a recent individual review more weight than people planning far ahead. The study concerned restaurants and travelers. For local service providers, the obvious conclusion is that the most recent reviews matter particularly and that a regular stream of new reviews achieves more than a single collection drive per year.

How to use reviews and other customer voices beyond the profile, for example on the website and in proposals, is covered in the article Using testimonials and references.

How do you reply to reviews, including bad ones?

A reply to a review is not read only by its author. It is read by everyone who checks your profile later. That is why it pays to think of replies as a public business card.

The most thorough study on this comes from Wang and Chaudhry (2018). They analyzed hotel reviews and replies on TripAdvisor and three booking portals, more than 20 million reviews in total. When a hotel started replying, its TripAdvisor ratings rose slightly afterwards, by 0.07 to 0.13 stars depending on the time window. On the booking portals, where later guests did not see the replies while writing, there was no effect. The effect therefore arises among readers.

The more important finding is the difference between praise and criticism. Replies to negative reviews improved the ratings of later guests. Replies to positive reviews worsened them. The more closely a reply addressed the content, the stronger both effects were. The authors interpret it like this: a specific reply to criticism looks like sincere complaint handling. A lengthy reply to praise looks like self-promotion.

The study concerns hotels, and the average effects are small. It fits with what Tran, Nguyen and Huynh (2026) found in interviews with hotel managers: templates for general and positive reviews, individual replies to critical ones.

What does the profile deliver? Measuring from view to inquiry

In its performance overview, the profile shows you how often it was viewed and how many people called, opened the website or requested directions. These are useful interim values. Whether they turn into orders is something only your own inquiry list can tell you.

There are two simple ways to make the source “profile” visible. Add a tag to the website link in the profile that your analytics tool recognizes as a separate source. And on the phone, ask every new inquirer how they found you. Both go into the same list as all other inquiries. How to calculate cost per order by channel from that is explained in the article Measuring marketing success.

With calls, expect a bottleneck the profile does not show: someone who calls and reaches nobody usually calls the next business on the list. So check whether the number in the profile is actually staffed during opening hours.

Fifteen minutes a week: the upkeep routine

A good profile does not come from one big push but from a small, fixed routine. Inyang and White (2026) surveyed 251 owners of small businesses in the United States. Those who actively managed their online reputation reported better business results, and in markets with strong competition this relationship was stronger. These are self-reports at a single point in time, but the direction is clear: upkeep pays off above all where customers have many alternatives.

Once a month a fourth step is added: transfer the numbers from the profile into the inquiry list and compare them with the previous month. Once a quarter, review category, services and description.

If you do not want to handle setup and ongoing reporting yourself, you can hand them off. This is offered, for example, by quik-services, a provider of websites, SEO and lead generation and a business partner of Owners Council. You should still keep replies to reviews in-house, because customers notice whether the owner is writing or a service provider.

The profile is also a source for answers from AI assistants that are asked about providers in the region. What this changes for your visibility is discussed in the article Visible in AI answers.

First steps for this week

To get started you need one hour and your phone. Search for your most important service with your town and look at what a customer sees.

• Check whether a profile for your business exists and who has access to it. The access belongs to the business, not to an agency or a former employee.
• Name one person and one deputy for upkeep.
• Compare name, category, address or service area, phone number and opening hours with the website.
• List each important service individually and upload five real photos.
• Reply to all unanswered reviews from the last twelve months, the critical ones first.
• Create a review link and decide when it is sent after every job.
• Add the source “business profile” to your inquiry list and block 15 minutes a week in the calendar.

After one quarter you will know how many inquiries and orders come through the profile. Only then is it worth asking whether you should also spend money on ads. How to decide that is covered in the article Search ads on a small budget.

We started by asking how the business profile becomes a reliable source of local inquiries. For searches with a local reference it is often the first contact with your business, and a claimed profile promises that someone is reachable. You keep this promise with complete details, specific replies to reviews, and fixed upkeep of 15 minutes a week. Whether it turns into orders is shown by its own source in the inquiry list.