Optimise your Google Business Profile to rank in the local pack

Setting up a Google Business Profile gets you on the map. Optimising it gets you into the local pack. This guide covers the fields that actually move rank, in priority order, with concrete examples for UK small businesses.

Categories: get the primary right, use secondaries sparingly

Primary category is the single most influential field on your profile. It tells Google which keyword set you're competing in.

• Look at the top 3 competitors in your local pack - what category do they use? You can see this in tools like LocalOutrank, or by examining the GBP HTML source of their listing.
• Pick the most specific match. Italian restaurant beats Restaurant if you serve Italian food.
• Secondary categories help you appear for adjacent searches but dilute your primary relevance if overused. Pick 2–4 you genuinely offer.

Description: written for humans, not bots

You get 750 characters. Google does not weight keyword stuffing here - but a clear, useful description influences click-through, which feeds back into rank.

Aim for:

• What you do in the first sentence.
• Where you do it (areas served).
• Two or three things that make you different.
• A clear next step ("Call to book", "Walk-ins welcome").

Services and Products: structured wins

Add each service as a separate item with a name and short description. Structured services power the "What this business offers" panel that appears for 25–40% of UK service searches now.

For e-commerce or retailers, the Products tab pulls from your feed or manual entries. Even a handful of well-photographed top sellers dramatically increases dwell time on your profile.

Photos: cover, exterior, interior, team, products

Photos are the most under-invested ranking lever we see. Profiles with regular photo activity in the last 90 days dominate visibility.

• Cover and profile - pick what shows up best at thumbnail size in Maps.
• Exterior shots - at least three, including signage and the approach. Helps Google understand you're a real bricks-and- mortar location.
• Interior - ambience, seating, equipment. Sets expectations.
• Team - humans buy from humans. One genuine photo beats five stock-y ones.
• Geotagging is unnecessary - Google strips EXIF location data on upload. Don't pay anyone selling "geo-tagged photo packages".

Cadence matters more than batch size: 4–6 fresh photos a month consistently outperforms 50 photos in one weekend then nothing for a year.

Posts: cheap, weekly, ignored by 90% of competitors

GBP Posts are short updates that appear on your profile for seven days. They aren't a strong ranking factor on their own, but they signal recency and drive directly attributable clicks.

• One post a week is the sweet spot. Topic ideas: a recent job, a seasonal offer, a new arrival, a customer story (with permission).
• Always include a CTA - Call, Book, Order Online - so the post earns its keep.
• Use Event posts for date-bound things. The countdown they show is a conversion booster.

Q&A: seed it before customers do

Anyone can post a question on your profile, and anyone can answer them - including spammers. Get ahead of it:

1. Sign out of your Google account or use a personal one (not the listing owner) to post the most common questions you get on the phone.
2. Sign back in as the business and answer them. Owner answers are marked specially.
3. Up-vote the question and answer from another personal Google account. Voted-up Q&A appears prominently on the profile.

Attributes and special hours

Tick every attribute that applies - women-owned, identifies-as, wheelchair accessible, free Wi-Fi, contactless payment. Some power their own filtered searches.

Add special hours for every UK bank holiday at the start of the year. Google hides listings without explicit holiday hours from "open now" searches on those days.

Booking links and direct actions

If you accept bookings (haircuts, restaurants, classes, dentists), add a direct booking link. Google partners with several UK booking providers; if yours isn't supported, a "Reserve" link to your own booking page is still better than nothing.

What to deprioritise

Don't burn time on:

• Stuffing keywords into your business name - it's against the guidelines and triggers competitor reports.
• Backlink-farming citation services for tiny UK directories - the uplift is tiny and they often get filtered.
• Buying review packs. We'll cover the proper review-velocity routine in another guide.