The Google Business Profile Checklist We Run on Every Client

Your website is yours. Your Google Business Profile is borrowed ground, and it still drives more calls than your homepage. Treat it like a storefront you clean every week.

Here is the checklist, in the order we run it.

Verify and lock it down

• Claim and verify the listing under an account you control, not your last marketing company's.
• Add a second owner so you are never locked out.
• Turn on notifications so you see edits and questions the day they happen.

Categories and services

• Primary category: the single most specific match for your core service.
• Secondary categories: everything else you genuinely do, and nothing you do not.
• List each service separately with a short description that sounds like a person wrote it.
• Add attributes honestly. Wheelchair accessible, veteran owned, free estimates. They show up in filters.

Name, address, phone, hours

• Use your legal business name. Stuffing keywords into it is the fastest route to a suspension.
• Match your address to your website footer exactly, character for character.
• Use a local number as the primary. Tracking numbers belong in the secondary slot.
• Update holiday hours before the holiday, not after.

Photos and video

• Cover photo and logo sized correctly and on brand.
• At least ten interior, exterior, team and job photos.
• New photos every month. Geotagged if you can, natural lighting if you cannot.
• Short video clips of work in progress outperform polished ads on local profiles.

Reviews

• Ask on the day of service with a short link.
• Reply to every review within forty eight hours.
• Never buy them, never trade them, never write them yourself.
• Log the words customers use. Those are your keywords, handed to you free.

Posts and Q and A

• One post a week: offer, project, tip, event. Keep it under a hundred words.
• Seed five real questions and answer them from the business account.
• Report answers that are wrong instead of arguing in public.

The mistakes that hurt most

Keyword stuffed business names. A virtual office address. Hours that do not match the door. Two profiles for one location. Each of these can wipe out months of progress in a single Google sweep.

Run it quarterly

Set a reminder. Profiles drift, categories change, competitors edit your listing. Thirty minutes every quarter keeps you ahead of the businesses that set it up once in 2019 and never looked again.

Want us to run this checklist on your profile for free? Book a Visibility Audit and we will send you the marked up version.