Google Business Profile checklist
This is the list I work through when I review a profile, in an order that lets you do it yourself in an afternoon. No paid tools, no SEO knowledge needed.
Before you touch anything
Search Google for your business and see what comes back. Either there is no profile, or there is one you already control, or there is one created by Google or a customer that nobody has claimed. The third is the most common and the one most people walk straight past.
If it exists and is not yours, claim it from the dashboard rather than creating another: a second profile splits your information, splits your reviews, and usually ends with one of them suspended. If there are two old ones for the same place, merge them.
Verification now normally means a single unedited phone video: the frontage with your sign, the street, the inside, and something showing you actually run the place. Having it ready saves weeks of back-and-forth.
The fields that carry the most weight, in order
Google describes local ranking as three things: relevance, distance and prominence. You can do nothing about distance. Almost everything you can do about the other two is decided here.
Name
The real one: what is on your sign, your invoices, your website. Nothing else. "Lopez Plumbing — 24h Emergency Santa Cruz" is the easiest mistake to make and a routine cause of suspension. Competitors doing it does not make it safe; it can in fact be reported.
Primary category
The highest-impact field on the profile, and the one most people pick in thirty seconds. It decides which searches you can appear in at all. Look at what the top three in your area use and be just as specific: "dental clinic" and "dentist" do not compete in the same lists.
Secondary categories
Only services you genuinely provide. Adding ten in case dilutes the primary one and brings you the wrong phone calls.
Address or service area
If customers come to you, show the address. If you go to them, hide it and set service areas instead; you cannot do both. A coworking desk or virtual office as a visible address is another suspension classic, and Google expects the areas to be sensible: its documentation talks about roughly a two-hour drive.
Phone and website
A number a person actually answers, not a call-centre line. The link should go to your own site, not your Facebook page, and each branch profile to that branch’s page.
Opening hours
The real ones, bank holidays included. There is a separate special-hours field for Christmas, Easter and local holidays. Using it spares you the one-star review from someone who found a locked door.
Make the details match everywhere
Name, address, phone. It is the dullest part of this list and it is where half the profiles I review fall down.
Photos
The attributes almost everyone leaves blank
They are buried in the dashboard and take five minutes. Several work as filters in Maps searches, so leaving them empty quietly keeps you off those lists.
How reviews actually work
You cannot delete a review. Neither can I, and neither can anyone offering to for 300 euros. The only mechanism is reporting it for breaking Google’s policies — spam, offensive content, a conflict of interest, someone who was never a customer — and waiting for a reviewer to decide. Sometimes it comes down and sometimes it does not.
What you do control is the reply, and replies get read more than owners assume. Answering a bad one in two sentences, politely, offering to sort it out by phone, does more for your reputation than the ten good ones above it. Reply to the good ones too, just not with the same sentence pasted thirty times.
Asking for reviews is allowed. Buying them, offering a discount for them, or asking first whether the experience was good so the link only goes to people who say yes, is not. That last one is sold by plenty of "reputation management" tools and breaks Google’s policies outright. What works is asking in person after a job well done.
Why listings get suspended
Nearly always one of these, and nearly always right after an edit.
And after that
A profile is never finished. Post a photo a month, answer reviews inside the same week, check the hours before every bank holiday, and look occasionally for a "suggested edit" someone made that Google accepted without telling you, because that happens.
Once the profile is clean, the next thing is not in the dashboard. It is on your website, in giving each branch or service its own page, and in getting your trade directories to say precisely what you say. That is Local SEO & Google Business Profile, and I do it too if you would rather not.
Carry on here