Your Google Business Profile goes stale quietly

It is doing more work than your website

For most home services businesses, the listing on the map is where the majority of first contact happens. Somebody searches, sees a card with a name, a star average, a photo and a call button, and taps. Many of them never reach your website at all.

Which makes it strange how rarely it gets looked at. Most owners set it up once, years ago, and have not opened it since. Meanwhile it is quietly the front door.

The four fields that go wrong

Almost all listing problems are one of four things, and all four are fixable in an afternoon.

• Hours that are wrong, especially around holidays. Somebody who drives to a closed business writes about it.
• A phone number that is out of date, or a mobile that has since been replaced. Every call to it is gone with no trace.
• A service area that no longer matches where you work, either too small to catch real jobs or so large it looks implausible.
• Services that have changed. Work you no longer do, or, more commonly, profitable work you added and never listed.

Photos date faster than you expect

A listing whose newest photo is from four years ago reads as a business that may not exist any more. The visitor is not consciously checking dates, but the impression forms anyway, from the van in the picture, the phone in someone's hand, the style of the kitchen.

You do not need a photographer. A few photos a month from jobs you are on anyway is plenty, and they are more convincing than anything staged. Take the finished work, not the mess, and take it in daylight if you can.

Answer the questions section

The questions and answers area on a listing is public and mostly unattended, which means it can accumulate wrong answers from strangers who guessed. Anyone can answer a question about your business, and if you never look, whatever they said is what your next customer reads.

Read it once a month. Answer anything unanswered yourself, plainly. It takes minutes and it is one of the few places where a competitor's misinformation can sit on your listing unchallenged.

Reply to reviews, including the good ones

A reply on a positive review takes fifteen seconds and it is read by everyone who scrolls past afterwards. It signals a business that is paying attention, which is the whole thing being assessed.

On a bad review, reply once, briefly, without arguing, and offer to sort it out off the platform. The reply is not for the person who wrote it. It is for the next reader, who is deciding whether a complaint about you is a fluke or a pattern.

Check who else has access

A surprising number of listings are still controlled by someone who no longer works with the business: an ex-employee, a nephew who set it up, a previous marketing company. As long as they hold the account, they can change the number, the hours or the website address, and you would find out from a customer.

Open the users section and read the list. Anyone on it who is not currently working with you should come off, and there should be at least two people who are, so a lost phone or a forgotten password does not lock the business out of its own front door.

This is also the moment to check what the website link points at. Listings that have been through a previous vendor sometimes point at a page that vendor still owns, which means the traffic and the enquiries are not arriving where you think they are.

Put it in the calendar, because nothing else will

None of this is hard and all of it is the kind of task that never becomes urgent. The listing does not break loudly. It just drifts out of date, one changed detail at a time, and the cost never appears anywhere you would look for it.

Half an hour, once a quarter, covers the whole list above. Put it in the calendar with the insurance renewal and the van service, next to the other things that only hurt when they are ignored.