Your Google Business Profile is probably wrong.

A few months ago I walked past a bakery I had not visited before. According to Google it was open. The lights were off and the door was locked. It had been closed on Tuesdays for two years. The Google Business Profile had never been updated.

I do not know how many people had tried the door and left. But I know it was not zero.

This is the most common type of problem I find when I audit a local business. Not a catastrophic failure. Not a missing website or a collapsed reputation. Just a piece of information, sitting in the most visible place on the internet, that has quietly been wrong for years.

Your Google Business Profile is, for most independent businesses, the single most important page you have online. Not your website. Not your Instagram. The profile.

When someone searches for your type of business near them, the profile appears first. The photos, the hours, the star rating, the description, the address, the phone number. All of it is visible before a customer clicks through to anything else.

On mobile, which is where most local searches happen, the profile takes up most of the screen. The website often does not appear at all unless someone specifically scrolls for it.

And yet most business owners set up their profile once, years ago, and have not looked at it since.

I have looked at hundreds of these profiles. The same mistakes come up repeatedly.

Wrong opening hours. Either never updated, or entered incorrectly at the start. If your profile says you close at five and you close at six, you are losing every customer who searches after five and assumes you are shut. Bank holiday hours are almost always missing entirely.

No photos, or very old photos. Google profiles with recent, high-quality photos get significantly more engagement than those without. A profile with no photos looks like a business that may have closed. A profile with one photo from 2019 looks like a business that stopped caring. Both are the wrong impression.

A description that says nothing. "We offer high quality services at competitive prices." "A welcoming and professional team." These tell a stranger nothing. What kind of services? For which customers? In which area? What makes you worth choosing over the place around the corner?

Wrong primary category. Google uses your primary category to decide which searches to show you in. A restaurant listed as a "Food and Drink" establishment rather than specifically as a "Thai Restaurant" or "Café" is losing searches it should be winning.

No posts. Google Business Posts are one of the most underused tools on the platform. A regular update (a seasonal menu change, a new service, a note about holiday hours) tells Google you are active. It also gives customers something current to read.

Getting your Google Business Profile right is not complicated. But most businesses have not done it, and they are paying for that every day.

Reviews are part of the profile, and how you handle them matters beyond the obvious.

The number of reviews is important. But so is recency. A profile with forty reviews, the most recent from eighteen months ago, looks like a business that used to be good. Two or three new reviews a month, even if the overall count is modest, tell a different story. They tell Google, and prospective customers, that people are still visiting and still happy.

Replies matter too. When you respond to a review, you signal to Google that someone is actively managing this profile. You signal to potential customers that you are paying attention. A business that replies to reviews, even briefly, looks more trustworthy than one that does not.

The Questions and Answers section is almost entirely ignored by business owners, which is a shame. Anyone can post a question on your profile. Anyone can answer it. Sometimes questions sit unanswered for months. Sometimes they are answered inaccurately by people who do not know your business well. You can seed this section yourself by posting the questions you get asked most, and answering them properly.

If I were going through your profile for the first time, here is the sequence I would follow.

First, confirm you are the verified owner. If you have not verified the profile, your edits will not necessarily show. The verification process has changed over the years but is currently done via a short video of your premises or a code sent to your registered address.

Second, fix your hours. Go through every day of the week. Add special hours for bank holidays. If you close for lunch, mark that. If you have different hours on Saturdays, set them. Check that the phone number and address are still correct.

Third, write a proper description. Not a slogan. A description. Tell a stranger what your business is, where it is, what you sell or do, and who it is for. Two hundred words done thoughtfully is worth twenty words done as an afterthought.

Fourth, add recent photos. Interior, exterior, products, food, work in progress. New photos, not old ones. Aim to add fresh ones every couple of months.

Fifth, review your primary category. Make sure it is specific enough to be useful. Then add any relevant secondary categories that describe what else you offer.

That is the minimum. Once those are in place, the next step is keeping it current: posting updates, collecting and responding to reviews, and checking the information every few months as things change.

None of this is technically complex. All of it makes a measurable difference to whether people find you when they search for what you do.