The Google Listing Self-Check

What the listing is

When someone searches a business by name, or searches the trade plus a town, the box that appears with hours, reviews, photos, and a map pin is the Google Business Profile. It is free, it belongs to the business, and it is the single page more homeowners look at than the website. Most shops set it up once, years ago, and have not opened it since, which is why a competitor with a worse crew and a better listing keeps getting the first call.

This check takes about twenty minutes at business.google.com. Sign in with the account that owns the listing, and if nobody knows which account that is, that is the first finding.

Who owns it

Search the business name on Google, click the listing, and look for an “Own this business?” link. If it appears, nobody has claimed the listing and anyone can. If it does not, the listing is claimed, and the question is by whom. A former employee, a website vendor, or a lead-seller who “set it up for free” are the usual answers, and each of them can lock the shop out of its own front door. The fix is a transfer of ownership inside the profile settings, or a reclaim request to Google if the owner cannot be reached, and it can take two weeks, which is why it is the first thing to check rather than the last.

While signed in, search the business name again and look for a second listing: an old address, a misspelling, a listing a lead-seller created. Duplicates split reviews between two profiles and confuse Google about which one is real. Mark the duplicate as a duplicate from inside the profile and Google will merge it.

The ten fields

• Primary category. Google allows one primary and up to nine secondary categories, and the primary decides most of what the listing shows up for. “Plumber” wins searches that “Contractor” never sees.
• Secondary categories. Each real service line the business sells, and nothing it does not. A category added to chase searches the shop cannot serve produces calls it has to turn down.
• Business name. The legal or trade name only. Stuffing a town or a service into the name violates Google’s rules and can get the listing suspended.
• Phone number. The same number that appears on the website and the truck. If a tracking number goes here, it is the primary number, and the office line moves to the additional-number field.
• Hours, including holiday hours. A listing that says open while the office is closed produces a missed call and a one-star review in the same afternoon.
• Service area. The towns actually served, drawn accurately. A radius that covers three counties the shop will not drive to costs nothing on the listing and everything in wasted calls.
• Services list. Every service, with a short plain description. This is what Google reads to match the listing to a search.
• Photos. Real trucks, real crew, real jobs, taken this year. Stock photos and the logo alone signal a business that is not active.
• Reviews and replies. The count, the recency, and whether every review has a reply from the owner within a week, written for that customer rather than pasted from a template.
• Questions and answers. Anyone can post a question on the listing, and anyone can answer it. If the shop is not answering, a stranger is.

What the numbers say

The chart below is from a survey of 1,002 US adults on how they use reviews when choosing a local business. It explains why the last two fields matter as much as the first two.

Replying to reviews

Every review gets a reply, including the good ones, and the reply is written for the person who left it. In the survey above, half of consumers said a templated or generic reply made them less likely to use the business, and four in five expect a reply within a week. A one-star review gets a calm reply that states what happened and what the shop did about it, written for the next reader rather than the angry one. Nobody wins an argument in a review thread, and the next customer is watching how the owner loses.

Where it goes wrong

The most common failure is not a missing field but a wrong one that nobody has looked at in three years: the old phone number, the hours from before the second truck, a category chosen by whoever set the listing up. The second is the listing the shop cannot edit at all. Both are found in the first five minutes of this check.