Google Business Profile setup

1. Search your business name on Google Maps before anything else — Google creates listings automatically and one may already exist.
2. Answer the four questions above to get your verification forecast, so you know what you are planning around.
3. Claim the existing listing, or create one if none exists. Never create a duplicate.
4. Set the most specific accurate primary category — the biggest relevance lever you control.
5. Set your address, or hide it and set a service area if customers never visit you.
6. Start verification and then leave the details alone until it completes.
7. While waiting, fill in everything else: hours, services, description, ten real photographs.
8. Get the review link and start asking every finished customer, the same day.

Do not edit the business name, address or category while verification is pending. Changes restart the process, and this is the most common reason a verification that seemed fine quietly resets.

Every guide to setting up a Google Business Profile treats verification as a step you complete. In practice it is a wait you endure, of somewhere between five minutes and three weeks, and which one you get is decided by Google based on your circumstances.

That matters because it interacts with everything else you are planning. If you are launching a website in ten days and your profile is on the postcard path, you will launch without the thing that produces most of your enquiries. Knowing that now lets you start verification first and build the site while you wait.

The forecast here is based on the pattern of what businesses in each situation are typically offered: service-area businesses are commonly steered toward video verification, new businesses at new addresses toward postcards, and established businesses at verifiable addresses toward faster methods. It is a well-informed expectation, not a promise, and Google changes the logic regularly without announcing it.

One preparation tip that saves a repeat attempt: if you are likely to get video verification, gather everything before you start recording. Your branded vehicle, your tools, your insurance paperwork, something showing your address, and the exterior of your premises if you have one. You cannot pause the recording to go and find things.

Google generates business listings automatically from other data sources — directories, aggregators, user submissions. A great many small businesses have a listing they never created, sometimes with reviews on it they never knew about.

Claiming that listing is always better than creating a new one, because it keeps the reviews, the history and whatever prominence it has accumulated. Creating a second listing because the first is inconvenient to claim produces a duplicate, and duplicates suppress each other and are far more work to merge than to claim.

If the existing listing is claimed by someone else — a former marketing agency, a previous owner, an old account of yours — you can request access. The current holder gets seven days to respond, and if they ignore it you can usually claim it after that. Check the masked email address Google shows you carefully first: a surprising share of these turn out to be an old account of your own, and recovering that account is much faster than the dispute process.

Google uses your primary category to determine relevance, and relevance determines whether you appear for a search at all. The most specific accurate category beats a broader one — Emergency Plumber over Plumber over Contractor — provided it is genuinely what you do.

Read the whole dropdown before choosing. The list is long, it is not alphabetically obvious, and there are frequently three plausible options with meaningfully different reach.

Then add secondary categories for your other real services, and only the real ones. Adding categories for work you do not do is a suspension risk, and it is self-defeating anyway: appearing for searches you cannot serve produces enquiries you turn down, which costs you time and produces nothing.

This is also a field worth revisiting. Google adds categories over time, and a more specific one than the best available when you set up may exist now.

Trades, mobile services and anyone working from home are service-area businesses. You still supply an address for verification, but you must tick the option that hides it — displaying a home address you do not receive customers at is against the guidelines and puts your home address on the internet.

Then set the areas you actually travel to: towns, suburbs or postcodes, named. Not an entire state, not a hundred-mile radius. An oversized service area dilutes the signal rather than widening your reach, and it produces enquiries from places you will not go.

Do not use a virtual office, a mailbox service, or a co-working address you do not staff. These are specifically prohibited and are one of the most common causes of profile removal — and the removal usually arrives long after setup, when you have come to depend on the listing.

You can fill in everything else while you wait — hours, phone, website, services with descriptions, the full 750-character description, photographs. Do it now rather than later; a profile that goes live complete is immediately useful, and a profile that goes live empty tends to stay empty.

Ten real photographs is the item that moves engagement most. Real work, real premises, real vehicles, real people. Not stock photography, which is recognisable, performs worse, and runs against Google's own guidance that photos should represent the business accurately.

Set special hours for the next public holiday while you are in there. It takes two minutes and it is the difference between a customer driving over and a customer not.

Then it becomes a habit rather than a task: ask every finished customer for a review the same day, reply to every review including the negative ones, and open the profile once a month to check that nobody — Google included — has quietly changed your hours or your category.