When someone searches for a local service, the map results often appear before the ordinary website listings. Those entries come from Google Business Profiles, and a profile that was set up years ago and never revisited can quietly send enquiries to a competitor whose profile is simply better kept.
Google is fairly open about what it looks at. Its local ranking help page says local results are mainly based on relevance (how well a profile matches the search), distance (how far the business is from the person searching) and prominence (how well known the business is, including how many reviews it has and how many websites link to it). It also states that there’s no way to pay for a better local ranking. Most of the mistakes below weaken relevance or prominence, and all of them can be fixed from your profile.
Picking a category that’s too broad, or too many
Your primary category tells Google what kind of business you are, and it affects which searches you can appear for and which features your profile offers. Google advises choosing the most specific category that fits. A tradesperson listed as a general “Contractor” when “Roofing contractor” or “Fencing contractor” exists is making life harder for themselves.
The opposite mistake is adding a category for every service. Google’s guidelines for representing your business say to use as few categories as possible, choosing ones that complete the sentence “This business IS a…” rather than “This business HAS a…”, and not to use categories as keywords. Individual services belong in the services section instead.
Google adds new categories from time to time, so it’s worth checking once a year whether a closer match now exists. Bear in mind that changing a category can prompt Google to ask you to verify the business again.
Adding keywords to the business name
It’s tempting to list yourself as “Smith & Sons Plumbing Gloucester Emergency Plumber”. The guidelines say your name should match your real-world name, as used on your signage, website and stationery, and that adding unnecessary information can get a profile suspended. If you trade as “Smith & Sons”, that’s the name to use. Relevance should come from your category, services and description, not a padded name.
While you’re checking the basics, two more guideline points catch people out:
- Service-area businesses that visit customers rather than receiving them at premises should hide their address and set a service area instead.
- Each location should have only one profile. Duplicates created by a previous owner or an old agency should be removed, not kept for extra visibility.
Forgetting special hours
A customer who turns up on a bank holiday because Google said you’d be open isn’t going to leave a kind review. Your regular hours keep showing unless you add special hours, which cover holidays, events and closures of up to six days in a row. Google also suggests confirming your hours for official holidays even when they’re unchanged, so customers can see the times are accurate. For a longer closure, such as a refurbishment or an off-season break, mark the business as temporarily closed instead.
A reminder in the diary before each bank holiday, and well before Christmas, stops this one slipping.
Leaving services empty
For many categories, Google lets you list individual services, either picking from suggestions for your type of business (a plumber might see options such as “Install tap” or “Repair toilet”) or adding your own, each with a description and an optional price. When someone searches for something you offer, that service may be highlighted on your profile.
Leaving this section empty, or pasting the same one-line description into every entry, wastes one of the simplest ways to show the full range of what you do. Write a sentence or two for each service in plain language. Custom service names that include prices or phone numbers are rejected automatically, so keep prices in the price field. If you run a shop selling physical goods, the product editor lets you add products in a similar way.
Letting photos go stale
“Add photos and videos” is one of Google’s own local ranking tips, and customers comparing two or three businesses notice when one profile has a handful of blurry photos from years ago. Recent, real photos of your van, team, premises and finished jobs do far more than stock images, and they cost nothing but a few minutes with a phone. Adding a couple every month is an easy habit to build.
Ignoring reviews, or asking for them the wrong way
Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking, and that replying to reviews shows customers you value their feedback. Even so, it’s common to find profiles with dozens of reviews and not a single reply.
A short, genuine reply to a negative review, acknowledging the problem and explaining what you did about it, often reassures a prospective customer more than another five-star rating would. The reviewer is notified when you reply and can still update their review afterwards.
How you ask matters as well. Google’s review policies don’t allow businesses to offer incentives for reviews or to ask only the customers they expect to be happy. UK law is firm on this too: since April 2025, fake reviews and reviews that hide an incentive have been banned outright under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, and the CMA’s guidance on reviews explains what’s covered. The safe approach is simple: ask every customer, soon after the job, using the review link or QR code from your profile.
Relying on the old Q&A section
For years, Business Profiles had a public questions and answers section where anyone could post a question or an answer, including people with no connection to the business. Google has been phasing it out. It discontinued the Q&A API on 3 November 2025, explaining that it was updating the Q&A functionality and experience. In December 2025, Google told businesses through its Business Profile help community that customers would instead be able to ask questions directly in Google Maps and get an instant answer based on the business’s information and relevant reviews.
Those AI-powered answers, built on Google’s Gemini models, are rolling out at different speeds in different countries, so what you see in the UK may still vary. Either way, there’s no longer a Q&A list worth maintaining. What you can control is the information those answers draw on:
- complete, accurate hours, services and attributes (such as parking or wheelchair access)
- a clear business description
- a website that answers the questions customers usually ask on the phone
If a question comes up again and again, make sure the answer is written down somewhere Google can find it.
Treating posts as a ranking shortcut
Posts (updates, offers and events) are still part of Business Profiles, and they’re a free way to share news, seasonal offers or recent work. Google doesn’t list posts among its local ranking tips, though, so treat them as information for customers rather than a way to climb the map results. Posts older than six months are archived unless you’ve set a date range, so a quiet posts section does no harm. If you do post, make it useful: holiday opening times, a new service, or a finished project with photos.
Fix the profile before increasing ad spend
When enquiries dip, raising the Google Ads budget can feel like the obvious move. If your Business Profile has been neglected, fixing it first is usually the cheaper step. It costs nothing but time and strengthens the local trust that helps your ads work harder too. If Ads is already part of the mix, a free Google Ads audit will show where the current budget is going before you commit more, and trades businesses may also want to read our guide to Google Local Services Ads.
Not sure which of these applies to your profile? Ask us for a review and we’ll tell you what we’d fix first, or read how our SEO consultancy approaches local visibility.
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