How to get your business found on Google locally

Why does the Google Business Profile matter more than the website?

For a local business, the Google Business Profile is doing more work than the homepage. It's what appears in the map pack, it carries the reviews, and it's what someone acts on when they search on a phone with intent to visit or call. Profile actions rose about 41% year on year between 2025 and 2026.

The effect of completing it is unusually large for something free: complete profiles get 30–50% more engagement, ones with photos get about 42% more direction requests, and a complete profile makes a business roughly 2.7x more likely to be seen as reputable.

• Exact categories — the primary one carries the most weight, so choose deliberately
• Full opening hours, including holidays
• Real photos of the premises, team and work, refreshed occasionally
• Services and products listed individually, not summarised
• A description that names what you do and where, in customer language
• Messaging and booking enabled, if you'll actually answer them

Reviews are the ranking factor you can't fake

87% of consumers read reviews before choosing a local business, and 78% won't consider one rated below four stars. That makes review count and recency more decisive than most on-site optimisation — and it's also the part most owners avoid, because asking feels awkward.

• Ask every satisfied customer, at the moment the work is done and they're pleased
• Make it one tap — a short link or QR code, never "search for us on Google"
• Reply to all of them, including the bad ones, briefly and without defensiveness
• Steady beats sudden: five reviews a month for a year outranks sixty in one week
• Never buy them; the pattern is detectable and the penalty is worse than the gap

Why must your business details be identical everywhere?

Search engines corroborate your details across sources. If your address is formatted three ways, your phone number differs between the site and the profile, and an old suite number is still listed somewhere, you're diluting the signal that says you exist at that location.

• Identical name, address and phone number everywhere, character for character
• Claim the industry directories that already list you, whether or not you registered
• Update everything when you move — old addresses persist for years
• Include the address in the site footer and in your Organization schema

Pages that match how people actually search

Local searches are a service plus a place. Nobody types your company name unless they already know you, which means ranking for it proves nothing. You need pages built around the phrase a stranger would use.

• One page per service, per main location — genuinely written, not spun from a template
• Use the place name naturally in the title, heading and opening line
• Include something only a local would write: districts, landmarks, local conditions
• Avoid twenty near-identical city pages; that pattern gets filtered as spam
• Add local proof — a nearby customer, a project in that area

A four-week plan

• Week 1: complete the Google Business Profile fully, add ten real photos
• Week 2: fix name, address and phone consistency across every listing you can find
• Week 3: ask your last twenty happy customers for a review, one message each
• Week 4: write the one service-plus-place page you most want to be found for
• Then: two reviews a month and one new page a quarter, indefinitely

Frequently asked questions