For a local business, the Google Business Profile is not a listing

For a local business, the Google Business Profile is not a listing — it is the storefront. More first-time customers meet you there than on your website, your Instagram, and your front door combined: they search, they see the card — photos, hours, reviews, the button that calls you — and they decide in about thirty seconds. Most owners finish half of it on a Tuesday in year one and never come back.

The checklist in this note is the one-time setup plus the weekly ten-minute routine:

• Claim it, then lock it — an unverified profile can be suspended at any edit; hunt duplicates (every twin splits your reviews in half); add managers, never share the login; true service-area businesses hide the address on purpose.
• The three fields that decide whether you exist — the real-world name from the sign (keyword stuffing is the fastest suspension in the book), the primary category of the money (not the category of the dream), and the attributes people actually filter by (wheelchair accessible, appointment required, women-owned).
• Hours: the field that manufactures one-stars — a customer drives twenty minutes to a door that says "Open" on Google and finds darkness. Special hours for every holiday and change; the "temporarily closed" flag is a fuse — set it for the flood, take it off the day you reopen.
• Photos: the freshness rule — one phone photo a month, forever. Google shows the dates; four photos from opening week read as a business that may not exist anymore.
• Questions and answers: seed it before strangers do — write the five questions your phone answers every week, answer them from the owner account, upvote them, and check monthly.
• Posts: the weekly flyer with a one-week shelf life — photo, two sentences, one link. The last post should never be older than the last month.
• Shelves with prices — top ten products or services, "from $X" is enough; a price range filters the wrong customer before the phone call does it badly.
• The rails — booking link straight to the calendar, messaging only if someone owns it (answered inside 24 hours or switched off), and a phone number that rings a real place (test it quarterly from a phone that isn't yours).
• The review loop — the ask happens at the moment of delight; the reply happens inside 24 hours; never let the newest review sit unanswered.
• The four Insights numbers — calls, direction requests, website clicks, top search terms. High views + low calls = photos or hours problem. Both low = category/name problem. And the top search terms tell you what customers call you — which is frequently not what's on the sign.

The traps that get profiles suspended: the keyword-stuffed name, review gating, bought reviews, the address game, set-and-forget, and posts that are ads only.

The worked example: a one-van mobile dog groomer whose direction-request map showed her two suburbs she'd been treating as "too far to bother." She named them as service areas, aimed the Tuesday post at them, and nine reviews in the first month (two taps from a card in every van visit) did the rest. Six months in, the profile outperformed year-one word of mouth — at zero media spend.

Full checklist with the weekly ten-minute routine: Google Business Profile Optimization Checklist — HIVE80lab Ops Notes

Free ops templates, no signup to read: HIVE80lab Ops Notes · The kit: Ops Starter Kit ($14) · The First 30 Minutes (free)