Try it on your phone: search for your service and your town. Before the first website, a map shows up with three businesses, their rating, their reviews and a call button. That's the local pack, and for a neighbourhood business it matters more than its own homepage. Your Google Business Profile —what we used to call Google My Business— is what decides whether you're on that map or on the second screen, where almost nobody looks.
What Google looks at to decide who gets shown
Google publishes this in its own help centre and there's no hidden trick: local ranking comes from mixing three factors.
- Relevance: how well your profile matches what that person searched for. Category, services and description do the heavy lifting here.
- Distance: how far you are from where the search happens. This can't be forced, which is why a made-up address ends badly.
- Prominence: how well known you are. Reviews, mentions, links, your website, your sector.
Distance is the one that catches people out. A business three streets away can outrank you for the same search simply because the person searching was standing closer to its door, and that changes with every query. It's one more reason to work on what you do control: a complete profile and a steady stream of reviews.
Two of the three can be worked on, one can't. Almost everything that helps comes down to filling the profile in properly and earning real reviews, with no shortcuts.
Fill it in completely, tedious as it is
Half the profiles we review have gaps: no services, no special hours, a two-line description, or a mobile number nobody uses any more. Every gap is information Google doesn't have when it decides whether to show you.
The primary category is the most important decision
It's the field with the most weight in the whole profile. A garage listed as "auto repair service" and one listed as "mechanic" compete for different searches. Pick the one that describes your main activity, not the one that sounds better, and add the secondary categories you genuinely cover. If you sell and repair, say so: that's two categories, not one.
Photos, hours and the details nobody checks
Photos of the real business —the premises, the team, finished work— outperform stock images, and it's worth adding one every month. Special hours for holidays save you the customer who turns up at a locked door in August. And the remaining fields —service area if you travel to customers, payment methods, accessibility, a link to the right page on your site— add up more than they seem, because they complete the information Google compares.
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The business name: what you can't do
This is the most repeated trap. Someone tells you to use "López Plumbing — 24h Emergencies Girona" as the name because it ranks better. It works for a while, then a competitor reports it and the profile gets suspended. The business representation guidelines are clear: the name has to be the real one, the one on the shopfront and on your invoices. Keywords belong in the category, the services and the description, which is what they're for.
Getting a suspended profile back takes weeks, and in the meantime you show up nowhere. It isn't worth it. The same goes for the address: listing a coworking space you never sit in, or a warehouse with no signage, is the kind of thing a competitor reports the day you start outranking them.
Reviews: ask for them and answer every one
This is the part that moves the needle most and gets neglected most. A business with 8 reviews and one with 60 on the same street aren't competing on equal terms, and whoever is comparing reads the last three or four before calling.
Asking is no mystery: you ask while the customer is happy, right then, with the job just finished. A short link in the confirmation WhatsApp works better than a sign on the wall. What you can't do is buy them or funnel only the happy ones through a filter: Google spots that and removes them.
Answering all of them, the good ones included, is one of the highest-return things a small business can do with twenty minutes a week. With negative ones, the reply isn't for the person who wrote it: it's for the fifty who will read it. No arguing, your version of events, and a way to sort it out. One detail that gets overlooked: a public reply shouldn't include the customer's details or what they hired, because that's personal data, and Spain's data protection agency publishes guides for small companies on handling it.
Posting on the profile: what to write and how often
You can post inside the profile, and almost nobody does. These are the updates that appear under your details when someone searches for you by name. They do two things: show news to people already looking at you, and signal that the business is alive.
What to post, without inventing anything: a finished job, the hours for the season starting, a service hardly anyone knows you offer, the answer to the question you get every week, a dated offer. Each post with a reason and a button, because one that doesn't invite any action is just decoration.
How often: two or three a month already sets you apart from a frozen profile. Our plans include 3 posts a month on the €400 plan, 5 on the €750 one and 7 on the €1,500 one, and all three answer every review. If you want to see how we approach it, it's explained in GMB posts.
Five mistakes that keep you off the map
- An unverified profile. Until verification is complete, as far as Google is concerned you don't quite exist.
- The wrong category, chosen for how it sounds rather than what you do.
- The wrong address: a coworking space where you don't meet customers, or your home when you actually travel to them. That's what the service area is for.
- Duplicate profiles left over from a move or a name change, competing with each other and splitting the reviews.
- Bought reviews. They get detected, removed, and they damage the profile's trust.
How to tell whether it's working
The profile comes with its own stats and you don't need to be technical to read them. Check three things a month: how many people arrive searching your name versus searching what you do (that second figure tells you whether local ranking is moving), how many calls and direction requests come from the profile, and which photos and posts got the most views.
And a one-minute check you can run today: take your phone, step outside, search your service plus your town and see whether you appear on the map. If you don't, you know what to work on next month.
What we do with your profile
We review the whole profile and leave it complete: category, services, description, special hours, photos and links to the right pages. From there we post on a calendar and answer every review, good and bad, with judgement and no templates. If you have several locations, we run them all the same way so none goes quiet.
It's part of the monthly plans, from €400 a month plus VAT with no lock-in. We work from Palamós with businesses across the province of Girona and the Barcelona area, where "near me" searches decide most of the calls.
If you'd like us to look at your profile and tell you what's missing, message us on WhatsApp. We reply the same day and you don't need to prepare anything.
Tell us what you need and we'll give you a price
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.