Google Business Profile

Often worth more than the website

For a local business — a clinic, a workshop, a restaurant, a supplier with a counter — the Google Business Profile is frequently the highest-earning thing you own online. It is what appears when someone searches nearby with intent to buy today, it sits above the organic results, and it carries the call button.

Most profiles are half-finished. Created once, categorised roughly, never revisited. That is the opportunity: the work is neither difficult nor expensive, and the businesses ahead of you locally have usually not done it either.

Category is the single biggest lever

More than anything else, the primary category determines which searches you appear in. Getting it wrong — or picking something vague because it sounded broader — quietly removes you from the exact queries that would have converted.

We research what your competitors are categorised as, what Google associates with the services you sell, and pick the primary and secondary categories deliberately. It is a ten-minute change that frequently moves more than a month of other work.

What we go through

• Verification. Unverified profiles rank poorly and cannot be fully edited. If yours is unverified we take it through the process.
• Duplicates. Two listings for one business split your reviews and compete with each other. We find and merge them.
• Categories and attributes. Primary, secondary, and the attributes that appear as filters in Maps.
• Services and products. Listed individually, in both languages, using the words customers search rather than your internal names.
• Photos. Real ones, correctly sized, added on a schedule rather than all at once.
• Hours. Including the ones that catch people out: Ramadan, public holidays, and the difference between the counter and the phone line.
• Reviews. Monitored, and answered — including the bad ones, because the reply is read by everyone who comes afterwards.

Both languages, always

Google shows the profile version matching the searcher’s language. A profile completed only in English is effectively invisible to a large share of the people looking for you in Riyadh, and the reverse is true for English-speaking residents and visitors. Filling in one language and stopping is the most common thing we find.

Reviews, done properly

You cannot buy reviews, offer discounts for them, or filter out unhappy customers before asking. All three are against Google’s policies and all three are detectable.

What works is unremarkable: asking every customer at the right moment, making it one tap rather than a hunt, and replying to everything. We set up the process and the short link; the asking has to come from you, because it works best from the person who did the work.