When someone searches “hair salon near me” or “accountant Thessaloniki”, Google does not show websites first. It shows the map with three businesses. Whether you are one of those three is not decided by your website, but by your Google Business Profile: the free profile most businesses set up in a hurry once and never opened again.
What Google looks at before showing you
Three things, in plain words:
- Relevance. How well your profile describes what the user is searching for. Categories, services, description, photos.
- Distance. Where you are relative to the searcher. You cannot change it, but the rest compensates.
- Prominence. Reviews, replies to reviews, consistency of your details across the internet.
The five minutes worth more than any ad
If you only do five things, do these:
- The right primary category. It is the heaviest signal of all. “Café” and “coffee roaster” are different worlds to Google.
- Opening hours that are true. Showing “Closed” while you are open drives customers away today and hurts your credibility tomorrow.
- Photos of the real place. Profiles with fresh, real photos get several times more clicks than profiles with a logo and nothing else.
- Reviews with a system, not by luck. Ask at the moment the customer is happy, with a QR code or an SMS carrying the link. And reply to all of them, good and bad. Your reply to a bad review is read by the next ten customers.
- A link to the site. The profile brings the call and the visit, the site closes the deal. One without the other stays half-done.
The mistakes that hide you
Duplicate profiles for the same business, an address written one way on the site and another on the map, a phone number that changed and was updated in only one place. Google gets as confused as the customers do, and when it is confused, it shows your competitor.
How it ties into everything else
The Business Profile is your local foundation. On top of it sit the Google Ads that target your area and the SMS and Viber campaigns that bring back customers who already know you. And since AI assistants increasingly draw their answers from this data, a proper profile counts there too. More in our guide on GEO and AI search.
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