Nick QuirkMost agencies treat Google Business Profile work as a one-hour onboarding task. Then six months later the client asks why a competitor two suburbs away outranks them in the map pack, and nobody on the team can say what was actually done to the profile, when, or by whom.
A Google Business Profile optimization checklist fixes that — not as a Google Doc someone copies into Slack, but as a repeatable, scoped, time-estimated deliverable you can price and prove. This is the version we've seen work across agency teams managing anywhere from 5 to 200 locations.
What this checklist covers (and what it won't fix)
Local ranking comes down to three things Google has been consistent about: relevance, distance, and prominence. Your checklist can meaningfully influence relevance and prominence. It cannot influence distance. If your client is 11km from the city centre and every competitor is at 2km, no amount of photo uploading closes that gap for high-volume centre-of-town queries.
Say that out loud in the kickoff call. It saves a painful conversation in month four and reframes the goal toward queries where the client can realistically win: suburb-level searches, service-specific searches, and branded discovery.
Phase 0: Access and baseline before you change anything
Half the GBP engagements that go sideways do so here. Work through this before a single field gets edited:
- Ownership, not management access. Confirm the client owns the profile. If an old agency or a franchisor holds primary ownership, start the transfer request immediately — it can take 3–7 days, longer if the listed owner ignores it.
- Screenshot everything. Full profile, all fields, current photo count, review count and average rating. Date-stamp it. This is your before-state for reporting later.
- Baseline rankings. Run a grid-based local rank tracker (Local Falcon, BrightLocal geo-grid, or similar) for 5–10 priority keywords before you touch the categories. A 7x7 grid at 1km spacing is usually enough for a single location.
- Log the suspension history. Ask directly: has this profile ever been suspended? If yes, you treat name and address edits with extreme caution.
- NAP source of truth. Agree the exact business name, address format, and phone number in writing. Everything downstream references this one string.
This phase takes 45–60 minutes and belongs in your client onboarding checklist, not in the first delivery sprint.
Core profile fields that actually move rankings
Categories (the highest-leverage field on the profile)
Primary category is the single biggest relevance lever in GBP. Before setting it, pull the primary categories of the top 3 ranking competitors for your target query — tools like GMB Everywhere or PlePer expose this in seconds.
Rules we apply:
- Primary category matches the highest-value service, not the broadest description. "Personal Injury Attorney" beats "Law Firm" when that's the money service.
- Add 3–7 secondary categories, all genuinely applicable. Stuffing 10 loosely-related categories dilutes relevance and raises suspension risk.
- Change the primary category alone, in isolation, and record the date. Expect a 1–3 week ranking wobble before it settles.
Business name
Use the real-world name on signage and legal documents. Keyword-stuffed names ("Dublin Plumbers | Emergency Plumbing 24/7") still rank — until a competitor files a redressal request and the profile gets suspended, taking reviews and rankings with it. If a client inherited a stuffed name, explain the risk in writing and let them decide. Don't quietly leave it and inherit the problem.
Services and products
Most profiles have 3 services listed. Populate 15–30, each with a 200–300 character description using natural service language. This is free relevance surface area and takes about 40 minutes to do properly. For product-led businesses, the Products module shows images in the profile and eats SERP real estate.
Description, attributes, hours
- Description: 750 characters, with the primary service and city in the first 150. It's weak for rankings but it converts.
- Attributes: fill every applicable one. "Wheelchair accessible entrance," "LGBTQ+ friendly," "Online appointments" all feed filtered searches.
- Hours: including special hours for every public holiday for the next 12 months. Set a recurring task — this is the deliverable clients notice when it's missing.
Photos, media, and why counts matter less than recency
Target 20+ original images at launch: exterior from the street (helps Google verify location), interior, team, and 8–10 of actual work or products. Then 3–5 new uploads monthly.
Geotagging EXIF data does nothing — Google strips it. What does correlate with performance is freshness and originality. Stock photography is obvious, and clients with 40 stock images consistently underperform clients with 20 phone photos of real jobs. Ask for a shared Drive folder and a monthly reminder; don't let photo supply become the bottleneck that stalls your retainer.
Reviews: the system, not the ask
Review velocity and recency matter more than raw count. A profile with 60 reviews and 4 in the last month outperforms one with 300 reviews where the newest is from 2022.
Build the system:
- Short link from the profile's "Ask for reviews" function, embedded in invoices, email signatures, and post-job SMS.
- Trigger point — the moment of maximum client happiness. For a trades business that's job completion; for a clinic it's 24 hours post-appointment.
- Response SLA of 48 hours on every review, positive and negative. Responses mentioning the service naturally ("glad the boiler replacement went smoothly") are indexed.
- Target velocity set against competitors. If the top-ranked competitor averages 6 reviews/month, 2/month won't close the gap.
Never gate reviews behind a satisfaction filter. It violates Google's policy and the fallout is permanent.
Website alignment: the half everyone skips
The profile's linked landing page is a ranking input. Point it at a dedicated location page, not the homepage, whenever there's more than one location.
Check that the location page carries matching NAP in crawlable HTML, embedded map, LocalBusiness schema with the same values, and genuinely unique content — not the same 600 words with the city name swapped. We've covered the line between useful and spammy in depth in location pages SEO without doorway spam, and it's worth reading before you build 40 of them for a multi-location client.
Also check for duplicate listings. Search the phone number and address in Google Maps. Merge or request removal of duplicates — they split your signals and are a common cause of ranking stagnation despite good profile work.
Measurement and reporting
GBP Insights alone won't satisfy a client paying £800/month. Layer in:
- UTM-tagged website link (
utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gbp) so GA4 separates profile traffic from general organic. - Call tracking — a tracked number in the primary field with the real number as secondary, or dynamic insertion on the landing page.
- Monthly geo-grid re-run for the same keywords on the same grid. The visual share
