Google Business Profile Mistakes That Quietly Cost You Calls

A Google Business Profile is the one bit of local search that is genuinely easy to finish. It is a form. You fill it in, it goes live, and it looks done.

Which is the problem. A profile that looks done can still be quietly disqualifying you from the searches you most want to appear in, and nothing tells you. There is no warning and no error message. The calls simply go to somebody else.

These are the mistakes worth checking on yours, in roughly the order they cost you money.

This is the single most expensive setting on the profile and the one most often picked carelessly, usually years ago, in about four seconds.

Your primary category does not describe your business for the benefit of customers reading it. It tells Google which searches you are a candidate for. Pick "Construction company" when people are searching for a bricklayer and you are not ranking badly for that search. You are not in it.

The test is simple. Write down the three searches you would most like to be found for. Then look at the businesses currently sitting in the map results for each one and check what category they are using. If yours is different, that is not a difference of opinion about how to describe yourself, it is the reason you are not there.

Secondary categories help, but they carry far less weight than the primary one. Get the primary right first, and change it to match the work you actually want more of rather than the work you happen to have done most of.

Google treats a business customers come to and a business that travels to customers as two different things, and the profile has to say which you are.

If customers visit you, the address needs to be there and verified. Hiding it because you work from home when you actually have people turning up is costing you the proximity signal that puts you in the map for anyone searching nearby.

If you travel to customers, you set a service area instead and the address stays hidden. The mistake here is greed: setting a radius that covers half the north of England on the theory that wider is better. It is not. A service area that large tells Google very little about where you are genuinely relevant, and you end up competing weakly everywhere instead of strongly where you actually work.

Set it to the area you would genuinely travel to on a Tuesday. If you want the towns further out as well, that is a job for pages on your website, not for stretching the radius.

Opening hours look like housekeeping. They are not. Google shows "Closed" or "Closes soon" directly in the results, and a customer with a problem now does not ring a business that is shut.

Two versions of this cost real work. The first is hours that were accurate three years ago and never updated, so you appear closed on a Saturday you now work. The second is bank holidays, which Google prompts you about and almost everyone ignores, so you sit there marked as open on a day nobody answers the phone.

The one to watch most carefully is "Temporarily closed". Businesses set it during a quiet spell or a holiday and forget, and it suppresses the profile heavily for as long as it is on. If you have ever used it, check it is off.

At some point somebody notices that the profiles called "Harrogate Plumbing and Heating Emergency Repairs" seem to do well, and copies the idea.

It does work, in the short term, which is exactly what makes it tempting. It also breaks Google rules, which say the name has to be the real name of the business as it appears on your signage, paperwork and premises. Competitors can report it, and they do, because it is the easiest report to make and the easiest one for Google to action.

What follows is not a telling off. It is a suspension, and getting a profile reinstated takes weeks of back and forth during which you are invisible. Having spent years building up reviews, that is an enormous amount to risk for a few extra keywords.

Use your real name. The keywords belong in your categories, your services list and your website, where they are allowed to be.

Most profiles are about half filled in. The description is a sentence, the services list is empty, there are three photos from 2021 and nothing in the Q&A.

The services list is the one worth doing properly, because it lets you name every job you do in the words customers use, rather than hoping one category covers all of it. Photos matter more than owners expect too, not for ranking so much as for the decision: a profile with recent pictures of actual work reads as a business still trading.

Then there is messaging, which is the opposite problem. It is often switched on without anybody realising, and a message that sits unanswered for two days does more damage than no messaging at all, because the customer has already decided what kind of business you are. Either answer it properly or turn it off.

The same goes for Q&A. Anybody can ask a question on your profile and anybody can answer it, including people who do not work for you. It is worth looking at what is sitting there.

Reviews are the part everybody knows matters, and replies are the part almost nobody keeps up with. The gap is visible: a customer reading your profile sees recent reviews with no response and reasonably concludes nobody is paying attention. An angry one sitting there unanswered lets somebody else speak for your business unchallenged.

It also feeds the ranking. A profile with reviews coming in and getting answered is an active profile, and activity is one of the things Google weighs when choosing who to show. Replies are the cheapest local SEO work there is, and the most commonly skipped, because they always arrive in the weeks you are busiest.

The last thing to check is whether you have more than one profile. Duplicates happen easily: somebody set one up years ago, or Google generated a listing from other data, or you moved premises and the old one never went. Two listings for the same business split your reviews and your signals, and the one ranking is often not the one you have been updating. Search your own business name and look properly at what comes back.

None of this is difficult work. It is just invisible work, which is why it goes undone for years. If you would rather it was handled and kept handled, that is what our local SEO work covers, and reviews can be answered for you within hours rather than whenever you next get a free evening.