Google Business Profile

For locally active businesses, the profile is the single most important instrument in local SEO, and often the first point of contact with new customers, even before your website is opened at all.

The basic idea behind it: Google answers local searches directly on the results page. Opening hours, reviews, directions and telephone number are exactly where the search takes place; the searcher does not have to open a single website. Anyone represented at this point with complete, up-to-date and trustworthy data wins the contact. Anyone who is missing or looks out of date leaves it to the competition, often without even noticing.

Where the profile appears

A well-maintained company profile appears in three places, each with its own task:

• In the knowledge panel: if someone searches directly for your company name, Google shows the profile card with all the key data next to the results (at the very top on mobile). This is your digital business card for everyone who already knows you or to whom you have been recommended.
• In the local pack: when searching for a service such as "physiotherapy Krefeld", the map box appears with three highlighted businesses. Here you compete for customers who do not yet know you: the most contested and most valuable spot in local search.
• On Google Maps: when searching directly in the maps app, including navigation, photos and reviews.

To put the names into context: Google Places became Google My Business in 2014, and since the end of 2021 the product has been called Google Business Profile. Google has discontinued the former separate management app; today you maintain your profile directly in Google Search or in the Maps app by searching for your own business while signed in. In everyday use, many people still say "Google My Business" or GMB for short; it means the same product, and the renaming has changed nothing about its importance for local visibility.

The components of the profile

Master data, categories and service area

The basis is formed by name, address, telephone number, website and opening hours, including special opening hours on public holidays, because nothing produces bad reviews more reliably than a journey to a locked door. The business name must correspond to the real name: additions such as location or service in the name field violate the Google guidelines for representing your business and risk the profile being suspended. Then there is the business description of up to 750 characters, enough space to explain services and special features in your own words instead of stringing keywords together.

The categories carry particular weight: the primary category describes your core business and plays a major role in determining which search queries Google assigns you to. Additional categories cover further business areas. An unsuitable primary category is one of the most common reasons why solid businesses remain locally invisible, and at the same time one of the quickest to fix.

For service providers without customer traffic at their premises (tradespeople, care services, mobile services), there is the service area model: you hide the address in the profile and instead define your service area by towns or regions. This makes you visible wherever you actually work, without directing customers or competitors to a private address.

Photos, posts and attributes

Photos shape the first impression: logo, cover image, team, premises, reference work. Important to know: users also upload photos, and these appear unfiltered in the profile. Anyone who does not supply images themselves leaves the first impression to chance. With posts, you publish news, offers or events directly in the profile, an underrated way of showing ongoing activity. Attributes add details such as accessibility or payment methods, and depending on the industry, services, products, menus or booking links can be stored in a structured way.

Reviews and questions & answers

Reviews are the most visible trust factor in the profile. Two things go together: actively but in compliance with the guidelines asking for reviews (without anything in return and without pre-filtering satisfied customers) and replying to every review, including critical ones. The reply to a bad review is read above all by the next prospect; anyone who remains factual and solution-oriented wins twice. For reviews that clearly violate the guidelines, such as insults, obvious mix-ups or fake reviews without any customer contact, Google offers a reporting function for review. There is only a right to deletion in the case of such violations; for false statements of fact, legal routes are also available in Germany.

The questions & answers section is public: anyone can ask questions, and anyone can answer them, including strangers. It is therefore worth posting the most frequent questions yourself, answering them correctly and activating notifications before third parties give incorrect information. A well-maintained Q&A section answers objections before they lead to someone leaving.

Set-up and verification in four steps

1. Check for an existing profile: Google often creates profiles automatically from publicly available data. First search for your business; if an entry already exists, you claim ownership instead of creating a duplicate. This way, existing reviews and the history are retained.
2. Create or take over the profile: with a Google account that permanently belongs to the company, not with the private account of an employee who will leave at some point and take access with them.
3. Verify: Google checks whether you really speak for the business. Depending on industry and location, verification takes place by video, telephone, email or postcard. Without completed verification, the range of functions remains considerably restricted.
4. Fill it in completely: categories, services, opening hours, description, photos. Every empty field is wasted relevance and, if in doubt, will be filled by Google or by users with their own suggestions.

Multiple locations and access rights

If you operate several branches or practices, each location gets its own profile with its own address, opening hours and reviews. The profiles can be bundled in the same account and managed centrally so that master data and brand presence remain consistent across all locations, while photos and review replies are maintained per location. For collaboration, there are graded roles: owners retain full control, managers maintain content and reply to reviews. An agency or service provider is invited as an additional user with their own account, never by passing on the password. This keeps it traceable who changed what, and access continues to belong to the company even after a change of service provider.

Why the profile counts for local ranking

Google sorts local results by relevance, distance and prominence. You have no influence on distance, but the profile contributes directly to the other two factors: categories, services and a complete description improve relevance, while reviews and visible activity strengthen prominence. Then there is the interplay with your website: a strong organic presence supports local ranking, and structured data via schema markup additionally makes your business data machine-readable. How all the building blocks interlock is shown in the entry local SEO; what it looks like step by step in practice is shown in our Google Maps guide for service providers.

The profile is also becoming a data source for AI-supported searches: AI Overviews and AI assistants draw on profile and map data for local questions. A complete, up-to-date profile is therefore also the ticket into answer formats that no longer look like classic search results at all.

Performance data: what the profile reveals about your customers

In the profile dashboard, Google shows under "Performance" how users interact with your listing: how often the profile appeared in Search and Maps, which search terms it was found by and how many calls, direction requests and website clicks resulted from it. This data is particularly valuable for local businesses because it reflects the contact route that bypasses your own website completely: the call directly from the map box does not appear in any website analysis. A practical tip: add UTM parameters to the website link in the profile so that visitors from the profile appear as a separate source in your web analytics rather than disappearing wholesale into organic Google traffic. Anyone who takes a monthly look at these figures quickly recognises whether profile maintenance is working and which search terms actually bring in customers.

Practical example: a dental practice in Krefeld

A typical scenario: a dentist takes over an existing practice in Krefeld. The company profile still exists from the predecessor: old practice name, outdated consultation hours, no photos of its own, a handful of mixed reviews and unanswered questions in the Q&A section. Anyone searching online for a dentist in Krefeld sees an abandoned profile and books elsewhere.

The approach: ownership is taken over instead of creating a new profile, so reviews and history are retained. Name, consultation hours and telephone number are updated, the primary category is set properly, and services from prophylaxis to implantology are stored in a structured way. The practice's own team and practice photos replace the random user images. The practice itself posts the most frequent patient questions (parking, services covered by statutory health insurance, how anxious patients are treated) in the Q&A section and answers them. It replies factually to the old critical reviews with a reference to the takeover, and at reception a small card asks satisfied patients for an honest review. Online appointment booking is linked directly in the profile, and once a month the practice manager looks at the performance data to see which search terms bring in appointments.

The result follows the familiar pattern: the profile looks inhabited again, the review picture grows and becomes more current, appointment requests come in directly via the booking link, and the practice appears again for service searches in the city area where previously only competitors were listed.

Common mistakes

• Keywords in the name field: "Dr Weber's practice – dentist Krefeld bleaching" is a guideline violation, not an SEO trick.
• Duplicates: two profiles for the same location dilute reviews and signals. Have duplicates merged instead of maintaining them in parallel.
• Wrong primary category: the most common silent visibility killer, and the quickest to fix.
• Ignored reviews and questions: unanswered criticism and incorrect third-party answers in the Q&A section shape the impression more strongly than any promotional photo.
• Outdated opening hours: especially on public holidays, the quickest route to an angry one-star review.
• The profile as a one-off project: without new photos, posts and replies, the listing looks abandoned after a few months.
• Private Google account: when the person who created the profile leaves, access otherwise leaves with them.

The Google Business Profile is free, can be set up solidly in a few hours and, for locally active businesses, is the lever with the best ratio of effort to impact. It does not replace a good website, but it helps decide whether searchers find you at all, trust you and call you. If you want to approach your profile, review strategy and local visibility systematically, our local SEO consulting supports you from set-up to ongoing maintenance.