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Your Google Business Profile is the most valuable free asset you have for winning local work. It decides whether you appear in the map pack, on Google Maps, and in the AI summaries that increasingly answer local questions before anyone reaches a website.
Most profiles are half finished. Here are ten fixes, in the order I would do them, each of which takes minutes rather than hours.
Business name, address, phone number, website, categories, opening hours, description, services, attributes and photos. Google rewards complete profiles because they give it more to match against. Empty fields are the single most common reason a profile underperforms.
Your name, address and phone number should match exactly across your profile, your website, and every directory you appear in. Down to whether you write "Street" or "St". Inconsistency splits the signals Google uses to trust your location, which quietly holds back your local rankings.
Your primary category carries more weight than almost anything else on the profile. Pick the one that describes your main service precisely rather than broadly, then add secondary categories for the rest. A tiler who sets their primary category as "Tiling contractor" will outrank one who set "Construction company".
Describe what you do and where you do it in the language your customers use. "Friendly independent café in Eastbourne town centre" beats "hospitality solutions provider". Work your main service and area in naturally within the first sentence or two, because that is the part most often shown.
Genuine photos of your premises, team, products and finished work outperform stock images by a wide margin. Profiles with recent photos get noticeably more interaction. Set a reminder to add two or three a month.
Reviews influence both ranking and the decision a customer makes on the spot. A steady trickle looks more credible than twenty arriving in one week. Ask every satisfied customer, make it easy with a direct link, and reply to each review including the difficult ones. A calm, specific reply to a complaint often persuades more readers than the five-star reviews above it.
Set your regular hours, then set special hours for bank holidays and closures before they arrive. Google surfaces "closing soon" and "open now" prominently, and a customer who drives to a closed shop leaves a review about it.
The services section lets you name each thing you offer with its own description. This gives Google explicit terms to match against searches, and it lets customers see immediately whether you do the specific job they need. Mirror the service pages on your website so the two reinforce each other.
Google Posts appear directly on your profile and signal that the business is active. Weekly is plenty. Seasonal offers, recently completed jobs, a new service, an event you are part of. Each post is another chance to appear for a relevant term.
Messaging lets customers contact you straight from the profile. Response time is visible, so switch it on only if you will reply quickly. Done well it captures enquiries that would otherwise go to whoever answers first.
AI tools and voice assistants lean heavily on structured, verified business data, and Google Business Profile is one of the cleanest sources available. A complete, consistent, actively maintained profile makes your business easy to recommend. A thin one gives an assistant very little reason to mention you.
The same logic runs through the rest of local search, which I cover in SEO for Eastbourne businesses and in improving your Google ranking without an agency.
If you want your profile and your website working together properly, get in touch. I work with growing businesses across Eastbourne and East Sussex on exactly this, and you can start with a free SEO audit to see where you stand today.
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