Home / Google profile checklist
Most profiles are about a third complete. This is what sits in the other two thirds and which parts of it are worth your afternoon.
A Google Business Profile has roughly two dozen fields, and most Indian businesses fill in four of them: name, address, phone and a logo. The rest is where the difference sits between appearing in local results and not. This is each field in order of what it actually changes, so you can stop after the first four if that is all the time you have.
This is the highest-leverage field on the entire profile and the one most often wrong. It tells Google what you are, and it decides which searches you are eligible to appear in at all. A dental clinic listed as Medical Centre is competing in a category patients do not search, against hospitals and diagnostic labs. Listed as Dentist, it is in the right race.
Choose the category your customer would use, not the one that best describes your ambitions. Nobody searches for a spatial design consultancy; they search for an architect. You can add secondary categories afterwards, but be sparing — four relevant ones beat eleven that dilute what Google thinks you are.
Almost nobody fills this in, and it is the biggest free win available. Every service you list is another thing Google can match a search against. A clinic that lists only Dental Treatment is invisible for root canal, for implants, for aligners, for wisdom tooth extraction — every one of which is what patients actually type. Listing fifteen services takes twenty minutes and is the closest thing to free traffic in local search.
Three matter more than the other thirty: the exterior as it appears from the street, so people can find you; the interior, so they know what they are walking into; and the people, because trust in a small business is trust in a person. Recency counts too — a profile whose last photograph is from 2019 reads as closed, whatever the hours say.
Phone photographs are fine. Stock images are not, and customers spot them faster than you would expect.
Wrong hours are the single most common fault we find and the one that most directly costs a walk-in. Set the special hours for public holidays as well; in Maharashtra that is a meaningful number of days a year when Google is confidently telling people you are open and you are not.
If you do nothing else on this page, fix the category and fill in the services. Between them they account for most of the difference between profiles that appear in local results and profiles that do not.
Your profile was always the thing customers saw before your website. It is now also one of the main sources an AI assistant reads when someone asks it to recommend a business nearby. A thin profile has always cost you visibility; it now also costs you a mention in answers you will never see and cannot correct. We go into that on the AI visibility page.
None of this requires a specialist. It requires an uninterrupted hour and somebody whose job it is. If you would rather it was ours, the Google Business Profile service covers it, but the honest position is that a determined owner can do most of this themselves in an afternoon.
A real audit of a real business site — what was wrong, what it was costing, and exactly what we would change. No pitch, no roundups, one email a week.
Businesses are anonymised. Unsubscribe in one click. We never pass your address to anyone.
Send your business name. In 60 minutes you get a field-by-field readout of what is filled in, what is wrong and what is empty.
The primary category. It determines which searches you are eligible to appear in at all. Services is a close second, because each service listed is another query Google can match you against.
No. Google's guidelines require the name to match your real-world signage, and keyword-stuffed names can be edited by Google or get the listing suspended. Use the name on your board.
Fewer than you think, but current. A clear exterior, a few interiors and a photograph of the people matter more than volume. Anything from 2019 should be replaced.
Yes. Replies are read by prospective customers scrolling the list, not mainly by the original reviewer. Working back through two years of unanswered reviews is one of the highest-return afternoons available.
The direct effect is modest. The value is that posts signal an active, maintained profile, and they occupy space in your panel that would otherwise be empty. Monthly is enough.