✓Get the key info right – Make sure your business name, address, phone number and website are present and correct, and populate your business category and opening hours.
✓Add additional info and attributes – Add as much info as you can about things like accessibility, products and services, and use high quality images to showcase these.
✓Maintain an active profile – Encourage (and respond to) reviews, post regularly and review info to keep it up to date. Use key terms where possible to support conversational search.
Local SEO is key for making small businesses visible online, and in 2026, your Google Business Profile is a massive part of that. Research by one American agency has even shown that it has been the highest weighted ranking factor in local SEO since 2018.
Yet many businesses either don’t have a profile. Or have one with incorrect or out-of-date info. Or are simply unaware of the many benefits a fully optimised Google Business Profile (GBP) can bring.
In 2026, with zero-click searches becoming the standard, searchers expect to be able to get the information they need right there in the search results. When it comes to finding a local business that meets their needs, they expect to be able to contact it, or get directions to it, from Google Maps. If your GBP is missing vital information, they won’t be able to do that… and they’ll contact one of your competitors instead.
All this means that your GBP can be one of the biggest drivers of traffic as a local business – both online and to your physical store. But only if you get it right.
As local SEO experts we understand exactly what that entails, but we’re happy to share the knowledge. If you want to optimise your Google Business Profile to make sure it drives traffic to your website, this blog post will guide the way – seven simple steps to a GBP that supports your business.
1. Get the Core Information Right
Obvious as it sounds, the place to start with your GBP is always the basic information – making sure your business name, address, number and URL are all visible and correct.
This is what your prospective customers need to know most, and search engines will want to see the information is accurate too (in fact, it’s one of the first things that Google themselves suggest you do with your GBP). Here are the things you should add as a necessity:
Business name
This should be the exact name of your business, nothing more. No keyword stuffing or descriptive subtitles.
If you’ve got multiple locations, you should add the location name as well (e.g. Business Name – London Office). If you do have more than one location, make sure the format of your name is consistent across all your sites.
Business category
Your business category is a big part of telling Google what your business does, and what searches it should up for, so you need to make sure it’s accurate.
Your primary category should be as specific and clear as possible, but you can also add subcategories to create more detail and more options.
Address
This should be your exact address, exactly as it appears on your website and any other promotional materials. It’s very easy to introduce different variations due to different formatting styles, or even the person who’s typing the info! But this can be confusing for search engines – and visitors.
Note – it can be the case that variations happen because of different address input formats across platforms. In this case, all you can do is try and be as consistent as possible.
Phone number
This is pretty standard, straightforward contact information. For many customers, phoning is the preferred method of contact – and even when it isn’t, knowing your business is reachable will inspire trust.
Website
If you’re optimising your GBP in the hope of driving more traffic to your website, you’re going to need the correct website address to be included.
Opening hours
Add your standard opening or operating hours, but you can also add special hours to cover additional or unusual opening times (such as over a Bank Holiday, seasonal or vacation period).
All of this information can be added (and updated) in your Profile Editor. As you hover over each section, a little pencil icon will appear, allowing you to edit that section.
When it comes to SEO, consistently updated reviews are worth more than occasional flurries. If you can garner a couple of reviews every week, that will have a bigger impact than getting 50 all at once.
Consistent reviews will feel more authentic, making them a stronger trust signal. Encourage customers to leave them by requesting them from customers, and making clear why they are beneficial. And always respond to reviews, good or bad, in a timely manner (24-48 hours, ideally). Happy customers will appreciate a “thanks for the great review” and unhappy customers might be less unhappy if they know their concerns have been heard and taken on board.
You can also use responses to reviews to add relevance. Even if the reviewer doesn’t mention a particular service or product, it’s often easier to include key terms in your response naturally, rather than trying to force them in elsewhere.
3. Optimise for Local AI Search
Like everything else, the way people search for local information has changed. Search queries are much more targeted and conversational. Where once a user might have typed into Google something like brunch near me, now they might type (or speak) where is a dog-friendly cafe that serves vegan brunch and has wifi into Google Maps.
Google will then look at the information you’ve provided in your GBP to answer these questions, including your business description, attributes, posts and reviews. So, the more info you can provide, and the more context you can give, the better!
4. Turn Your Profile into a Conversion Engine
If you look at your Google Business Profile as purely a discovery tool, you’re missing out on some of the strongest value it can deliver. You need to use it to drive conversions too.
In practice, this means paying attention to a couple of different things:
Your business description
Just because your business description needs to be brief to be effective doesn’t mean it can’t also be strategically written too.
Write it with your human audience in mind. Think about what they want to know and what will encourage them to click. You should include your services and locations, but do it naturally, and make sure everything they could need to know about your business is clear.
Your Services and Products tabs
Your GBP now includes a ‘services’ or ‘products’ section, which can help you make sure you turn up in relevant searches and make sure the right information is appearing when you do.
Take a similar approach as you would for long-tail keywords on your website. Google does offer auto suggestions that can be useful, but make sure to bear in mind what you know your audience searches for. You can add custom choices.
Where possible, include details like pricing. If your prices change a lot, then this might not be relevant, but if they’re steady, this type of information does encourage click-through. Customers react well to transparency about prices as they build trust.
High-impact visuals
Wherever possible, use authentic images of your products, business or team. Unique or accurate images of your products can encourage conversions by showing customers exactly what they’re getting. This is an important trust signal.
Meanwhile, research by a UX expert showed that people scroll past stock images without taking it in, meaning using generic stock images brings very little in the way of actual benefits to your site.
AI-generated images can have an even more damaging impact on your customer relationship as well. Studies have shown AI images can actively erode trust, chasing away customers rather than convincing them to convert.
It’s not just human users who analyse your photos – Google’s Vision AI does, too. Google will scan the contents of your images to identify specific services, products and physical attributes (for example, wheelchair access, outdoor seating or specific dish items). Uploading high-resolution photos demonstrating these attributes regularly helps Google visually verify what your business offers, increasing your visibility for those targeted conversational queries.
Additional info
Google allows you to add additional attributes to your profile, including features such as free wifi, wheelchair accessibility, parking options and more. You can add this under the “More” tab in your Profile Editor
5. Google Business Profile Posts
You can also add posts to your Google Business Profile – similar to the kind of posts you’d put on your social channels. This means you can use them to promote events, services, seasonal offers, award wins, new blog posts…. the list goes on.
The more regularly you can post, the better, as Google does reward profiles that have frequent engagement.
6. Insights and Tracking
The thing about optimising for conversions is that you’re never quite finished. Make sure you set up your website’s tracking to monitor the traffic received from GBP. You can do this by tagging up your website URLs with utm parameters, which specify where particular traffic originated from. So for example, your URL in your GBP might look like this:
Where “medium” specifies the channel the traffic has come from (e.g. organic, email), source specifies the platform (e.g. google, facebook) and campaign specifies a particular campaign or promotion (e.g. gbp-listing, summer-sale).
You can combine this with GBP’s own insights data. This is not hugely extensive and only goes back six months, but it does tell you how many website clicks, click to call requests and direction requests you’ve had in a given period:
7. Keep Your Optimisation Continuous
Optimisation is never a one-off activity – and that includes your GBP. You should be returning at least once a month to check everything in your profile is updated, make changes and add things where needed.
Updating your GBP will show customers and search engines that your business is active and worth ranking or visiting. But updating doesn’t just mean checking your contact information is still current, you can also make other changes.
If you’re able to, the first thing you should do is add new posts and updates at least once a month. This could be news about products or the business, special offers, events or details on recent projects.
You can also add new pictures (though these should still be real pictures) and respond to reviews, which has multiple benefits that we’ve already discussed.
If your business relies on local custom, then you can’t afford to neglect your local SEO. Your Google Business Profile is a key part of that, but there is a lot more to consider as well.
Our team of local SEO experts know all the steps you need to take to make your business stand out more and drive more traffic to your website. Speak to us today to find out how we can help.
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Local SEO goes beyond your Google Business Profile. Want to boost your local visibility?
Susan Giles is a skilled SEO copywriter and creative content writer with a passion for storytelling and a talent for turning complex ideas into engaging, accessible content.
With a background in freelance writing and creative writing tutoring, she brings both technical know-how and a love of language to everything she creates. Whether polishing existing copy or crafting fresh, optimised content from scratch, Susan knows how to make words work harder. Outside of writing, she’s usually buried in a good book.
