- 01
Enter and check every Google Business Profile field: business name, primary category, secondary categories, address, phone, website, hours, services and products, the 750-character description, and attributes. Complete profiles are reported to outperform incomplete ones — by up to 7x more clicks in one unsourced claim, and by ranking 2 to 3 times higher in the local pack in a 2025 analysis of 100 profiles. The two figures measure different things and should not be combined.
- 02
Use the real-world business name exactly as it is. Google's guidelines for representing a business prohibit keyword-stuffed or location-stuffed names, and require one profile per location. Rental and for-sale properties and lead-generation entities are listed as ineligible.
- 03
Verify the location and keep hours accurate, including changes for holidays. Being open at the time of search is reported as the 5th most influential Map Pack factor (no source given for that ranking).
- 04
Map each service you sell to a standardized service item in the profile rather than one broad bucket — for a plumber: "drain cleaning," "leak detection," "water heater replacement," "trenchless sewer repair" — and put the city or neighborhood in the custom description for each item.
- 05
Set the service-area polygon to the ground you actually cover. A claim of statewide coverage from a single ZIP is reported to be filtered from map results more aggressively than in 2024. This is a blog claim about Google product behavior and is not corroborated by a Google source.
- 06
Use a local area-code phone number on the profile and everywhere else, not a toll-free number.
- 07
Write one content-rich landing page per city you serve, with the H1 "[Service] in [City]" and H2s for What we offer, Service area, Pricing or estimates, Why choose [Business Name], and FAQ. Avoid a single "Areas We Serve" list page.
- 08
Build citations in tier order: data aggregators (Neustar Localeze, Acxiom, Foursquare, Factual), then major directories (Yelp, Facebook, Apple Maps, Bing Places, BBB), then industry-specific sites (Angi, Houzz, Avvo, Healthgrades). At minimum, claim Apple Maps, Bing Places, and Yelp.
- 09
Ask every customer for a review and respond to reviews, including negative ones. Do not offer incentives, do not filter who gets asked, and do not discourage negative reviews — Google prohibits all three, and the FTC reviews rule effective October 2024 puts fake and certain incentivized reviews at civil-penalty risk for US businesses.
- 10
Add LocalBusiness structured data to your site (name, address, telephone, openingHoursSpecification, geo, priceRange and related fields). Google's position is that structured data helps eligibility for rich results, does not guarantee them, and is not a direct ranking signal.
