Most Google Business Profiles are set up once, when the business opens, and then never touched again. The owner picks a category, adds a few photos taken on a phone, types in the address, and moves on to the actual job of running the business. Two years later they wonder why a competitor with worse reviews ranks above them on the map. The answer is almost always that the competitor keeps their profile alive and theirs is collecting dust.

This checklist covers everything that meaningfully affects your ranking and conversion in 2026. Not the things that used to matter and don't anymore (keyword stuffing in your business name, posting daily updates that nobody reads), and not the things that have never mattered (paid GBP "optimization" packages from agencies that just fill in the fields you could fill in yourself). The list below is what we'd actually do if we took over your profile tomorrow.

1. The setup fields that affect ranking

Most of the basic fields don't move the needle on their own, but getting them wrong can quietly cap how high you rank for the searches you care about. Work through them in this order.

  • Business name. Use exactly what's on your storefront, signage, and legal documents. No keywords appended ("Bob's Plumbing & Emergency 24/7 London"). Google's spam filter catches this and either suppresses the profile or strips the extras silently.
  • Primary category. The single biggest ranking factor on a profile. Pick the most specific match available. "Italian restaurant" ranks for "Italian restaurant near me" much better than "Restaurant" does. If you're unsure which is most specific, search for top competitors in your area and look at theirs.
  • Secondary categories. Add up to nine, but only ones that genuinely describe your business. A pizzeria might add "Italian restaurant" and "Takeout restaurant" but not "Catering service" unless they actually do catering. Irrelevant categories dilute relevance for the ones that matter.
  • Address. If you serve customers at your location, show the address. If you only travel to customers (electrician, plumber, mobile groomer), hide the address and set service areas instead. A hidden address is fine; a missing one isn't.
  • Service areas. List up to twenty cities or regions. Don't be greedy – if you're an Amsterdam plumber, listing every city in the Netherlands does nothing for your ranking and can trigger spam review.
  • Phone number. A local number outranks a 0800 or toll-free number for local searches. If you have both, put the local one as primary and the freephone as secondary.
  • Website. Link to your homepage, not your contact page. Make sure the website's address and phone match the profile exactly – mismatches confuse Google about whether two listings are the same business.
  • Hours. Set them, and update them when they change. Profiles with stale hours get "people may be checking the wrong hours" flags that suppress them in the local pack. Set special hours for public holidays a week before each one.
  • Opening date. If your business is more than a few years old, fill this in. Old businesses rank slightly higher for trust-related queries than new ones.

2. Photos that actually do something

Photos are the second-most-undervalued part of a profile, after reviews. They affect whether someone clicks on your listing in the map pack, which Google measures and uses as a ranking signal. A profile with three blurry photos taken in 2019 looks closed even when it isn't.

The recommended counts that actually matter, by photo type:

  • Logo. One. A clean square version, transparent background if you have it.
  • Cover photo. One. The exterior of your business if you have a storefront, a hero shot of your work if you don't. This is what shows up first when someone clicks through.
  • Interior. 5 to 10. What it looks like when someone walks in. Good lighting matters more than a fancy camera – phone photos taken at midday are fine.
  • Team. 2 to 5. Faces of the actual people who work there, not stock photos. Customers click these and Google notices.
  • Product or service. 10 to 30. Plates of food for restaurants, finished cuts for salons, completed installations for tradespeople. Add new ones every few weeks – freshness signals an active business.
  • Behind-the-scenes. Optional but useful. Prep work, packaging, the team setting up. These get high engagement and humanise the profile.

Two things to avoid: don't upload heavily filtered or AI-generated images (they look obviously off and customers click past them), and don't upload photos with text overlays or watermarks beyond a small logo – Google's image policies prohibit promotional text and overlays, and these get rejected or quietly hidden from the gallery.

3. Reviews – the single biggest ranking factor

If you do nothing else from this checklist, do this one. Reviews are the largest single factor most local SEO studies measure for the map pack, and they drive almost all of the conversion. A profile with 87 reviews at 4.7 stars will out-convert a profile with 12 reviews at 5.0 stars almost every time, because the higher review count signals an established business.

The targets to aim for:

  • At least 25 reviews before you start to look established. Below this, your average rating swings wildly with each new review and customers don't trust the number.
  • 4.5 stars or higher. Below 4.3, conversion drops off a cliff – people scroll past without clicking. The difference between 4.5 and 4.8 is much smaller than the difference between 4.2 and 4.5.
  • A steady stream, not a burst. Five reviews a month for two years is worth more than 60 reviews in one month. Bursts trigger Google's spam filter and can get reviews removed.
  • Replies to every single review, positive and negative. Google's own help docs encourage owner replies, and a profile that replies to everything reads as actively run – which matters to the customer reading reviews even more than to Google. A 30-word reply is plenty.

The hardest part is making review collection a habit instead of an occasional push. The businesses that rank best have a system that asks every customer once, automatically, without anyone in the business having to remember. If you're doing this manually and getting maybe two reviews a month, a tool that automates the ask – like TrustMint – will usually take you to 8 to 15 reviews a month from the same customer base.

For replying, our 20 review response templates covers every situation from glowing five-stars to one-star pricing complaints. Copy, paste, customise the name.

4. Posts and updates

Google posts are the part of the profile that almost everyone gets wrong. The advice you'll see online is "post weekly" or "post daily." That's wrong because Google posts disappear from the public view after seven days unless they're an event or offer. So a weekly post means your profile is empty most of the time, and a daily post is a job nobody is going to keep up with.

What actually works:

  • One offer post that's always live. Set an end date six months out. Update it when the offer changes. This means there's always something showing in the "From the owner" section.
  • An event post for anything time-bound. Holiday hours, a sale, a new product launch, a pop-up. Events stay visible for the duration plus a few days after.
  • An update post when something genuinely new happens. A new service, a renovation, an award. Don't post for the sake of posting – nobody reads filler and Google doesn't reward it.

The CTA on the post matters more than the photo. "Call now" and "Book online" outperform "Learn more" by a wide margin in click-throughs. Use the strongest CTA you can offer.

5. Questions and answers

The Q&A section is where most profiles let themselves down. Customers can ask questions publicly, and they get answered by other customers if you don't get there first. Some of those answers are wrong, some are sarcastic, and a few are competitors quietly poisoning the well.

  • Turn on notifications. Any new question pings you. Answer within 24 hours so a third party can't get there first. The first answer gets the most upvotes and stays at the top.
  • Pre-empt the obvious questions. Add the answers to the questions you get every week – "Do you take walk-ins?", "Do you offer parking?", "Are dogs allowed?" – into your business description and your services list, so they're already answered before anyone has to ask. The owner can also post the question directly from the business account, but Google's policies discourage using sock-puppet accounts to fake demand, so keep it factual and don't try to game it.

6. Attributes and services

Attributes are the small tags Google shows on your profile – "Wheelchair accessible", "Free Wi-Fi", "Outdoor seating", "Online appointments", "Black-owned". They affect filtered searches (someone searching "wheelchair accessible restaurant" will only see profiles with the attribute checked) and they affect ranking for adjacent queries.

Go through every attribute available for your category and tick the ones that genuinely apply. Don't tick ones that don't – customers showing up to a "wheelchair accessible" venue with three steps at the entrance will leave a one-star review and you'll deserve it.

Services and products are similar. List them all, with a one-line description and a price if you can. Profiles with detailed services rank higher for searches that match the service names, and the descriptions show up in the local pack as a snippet under your business name.

7. Products and menus

For restaurants, cafes, bakeries, bars, and any food business, a complete menu in Google's product format is one of the few high-effort optimisations that genuinely moves rankings. Google reads the menu items as keywords and serves your profile for searches like "carbonara near me" or "matcha latte Amsterdam."

For retail, list your products with photos, descriptions, and prices. The product listings show up in the "Products" tab on your profile and in some cases directly in search results.

For service businesses (salons, spas, clinics), use the services section instead of products. Same principle – list everything, price what you can, describe each one in a sentence.

8. Messaging

Turn it on. Set the auto-reply to acknowledge the message and tell the customer when you'll respond ("Thanks for the message – we'll reply within an hour during business hours"). Then actually reply within an hour during business hours.

The reason this matters: profiles that reply fast earn a "typically replies within an hour" badge that meaningfully improves the click-to-contact rate. Profiles with messaging on but slow replies get nothing – and if you ignore messages for a week, Google can disable messaging on your profile entirely. If you can't commit to fast replies, leave it off.

9. Insights and tracking

Check the insights tab once a month. The numbers that matter:

  • Searches breakdown. Direct (people searching your business name) vs. discovery (people searching a category and finding you). If discovery is low, you're not ranking for the searches you should be – usually a category or attributes problem.
  • Calls and direction requests. These are the two highest-intent actions on a profile. Track them month over month. A drop usually means a competitor moved above you in the local pack.
  • Photo views. Compared to similar businesses. If you're below average, you don't have enough photos or your photos aren't engaging enough.

None of these will tell you exactly why something changed, but they'll tell you what to investigate.

10. Common mistakes that quietly tank your ranking

The mistakes that show up over and over when we audit profiles:

  • Multiple profiles for the same business. Often an old listing from a previous owner or a duplicate someone created by accident. Both rank lower than one merged profile would. File a duplicate report through Google support to merge them.
  • Inconsistent name, address, or phone across your profile, website, and other directories. Google checks for consistency and uses it as a trust signal. Pick one canonical version and update everywhere.
  • A virtual office address. Google's policies prohibit using virtual offices, coworking addresses, or PO boxes as a primary address for service-area businesses. Profiles using them get suspended without warning, sometimes years later.
  • Buying reviews. Obvious, but worth saying. Google's filters have got dramatically better in the last two years. Bought reviews get removed in batches and the profile gets flagged. Don't.
  • Asking for reviews from a single device. If 20 customers leave reviews from the same IP (e.g. your shop's WiFi), Google may filter all of them. Ask customers to leave the review later, from their own device, on their own connection.
  • Letting the profile go quiet. No new photos, no new reviews, no replies, no posts, for six months. Google interprets this as a signal that the business may have closed or moved. The fix is just to do something on the profile every couple of weeks – a photo, a reply, a post.

The order to do this in

If you're starting from a profile that's been neglected for a while, don't try to do all of this in one weekend. The order that gets you results fastest:

  1. Fix the basic setup fields (week 1, an hour).
  2. Add 20 to 30 fresh photos (week 1, two hours).
  3. Set up an automated review collection system and start asking every customer (week 2, ongoing).
  4. Reply to every existing review you haven't replied to (week 2, an hour or two).
  5. Pre-seed the Q&A and turn on messaging (week 3, an hour).
  6. Add a permanent offer post and any current event posts (week 3, 30 minutes).
  7. Audit attributes, services, and products (week 4, two hours).
  8. Check insights monthly from then on.

Most of the ranking improvement from this list comes from steps 3 and 4 – reviews and replies. Everything else is supporting work that lets the reviews do their job. If you only have time for one thing, set up the review system and let it run.

Our free Google Business Profile guide walks through each of these steps with screenshots from the GBP dashboard, in case you want a visual companion. And if you want the review collection part handled automatically – with unhappy customers filtered to a private feedback form instead of leaving public one-stars – that's what TrustMint does. Free for 14 days, no card needed, and the setup takes about ten minutes.