Google Business Profile: how to optimise your listing and get found locally

A neighbourhood gym launches pilates classes in September. The website is new, the photos look great, the flyer has gone through every letterbox on the street. Yet someone typing “pilates near me” three hundred metres away sees three competitors on Google’s map, and not the gym. Open the listing: category “Fitness centre”, no services listed, summer opening hours, and the last reply to a review was two years ago. The problem isn’t the website. It’s the listing.

The short answer is this: Google Business Profile is the listing that appears on Maps and in Search when someone looks for something nearby. Google ranks it on three factors: relevance, distance and prominence. There’s little you can do about distance; there’s a lot you can do about the other two: the correct primary category, complete services and description, real photos, reviews requested regularly and always answered, and identical details across your listing, website and directories. Posts mainly help people reading the listing, less so your ranking.

Here we stick to the practical side, with examples for gyms, events and shops. Our examples come from our work with businesses in Italy, but the rules are Google’s and apply everywhere. How the listing fits into a full website review is explained in our guide to the SEO audit; an event page with structured data is covered in the article on SEO for local events.

What is Google Business Profile and where does it appear?

It’s the free profile a business uses to manage its information on Google: name, address, opening hours, phone, website, category, services, photos, reviews and posts. It appears when someone searches for the business’s name, in the map block when they search for a service nearby, and within Google Maps.

The name has changed several times: first Google My Business, then Google Business Profile, which in Google’s Italian help pages is called the Profilo dell’attività su Google. They’re the same thing. You manage the listing directly from Search or from the Maps app, when you’re signed in with the Google account that owns or manages it.

A listing can exist even if no one has ever claimed it, created from public data and user contributions. If you don’t manage it, other people can suggest changes to the opening hours, photos and category.

How does Google decide who to show on the map?

Google says so explicitly in its guide on how to improve your local ranking: local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence (in the Italian version of the guide the third factor also appears as “popularity”). Nobody knows the exact formula, and Google makes clear that you can’t pay to rank higher in local results.

Factor	What it measures	How much you can influence it	What to work on
Relevance	How well the listing matches what the person is searching for	A lot	Primary category, additional categories, services, description, attributes, website content
Distance	How far the business is from the searcher, or from the location in the search	Almost not at all	A precise address, the correct service area for those who work at customers’ premises
Prominence	How well known the business is, online and offline	Quite a lot, over time	Reviews and replies, links and mentions from other websites, brand awareness, the website’s position in the results

Two practical consequences. A business further away can appear before yours if Google considers it a better fit for that search: distance isn’t everything. And the listing doesn’t live on its own: among the prominence signals, Google also mentions the websites that link to the business. A well-kept listing with a weak website is still starting uphill.

So really nothing can be done about distance?

You can’t move your premises, but you can avoid making things worse. Enter the full address, with the street number and, if needed, the staircase or floor, and make sure the pin on the map falls on the right entrance. For those who work at customers’ premises, such as a personal trainer or a technician, Google lets you hide the address and specify a service area by city or postcode, not by radius in kilometres.

How do you choose the primary category?

The primary category is the choice that weighs most on relevance: it tells Google what you are, not what you sell. You choose it from a closed list, as explained in the guide to managing your business category, and you can add up to nine additional categories.

Google’s guidelines ask you to use as few categories as necessary to describe your core business, and not to use them as keywords. In practice we take three steps:

1. We write down in one sentence what the business does, as a customer would put it. “Gym with a weights room and group classes”, not “complete wellness centre”.
2. We search Google for the main queries (for example “gym Turin San Salvario”) and look at the primary category of the top listings on the map.
3. We choose the most specific primary category that is true and add as secondary categories only activities that genuinely take place, with dedicated space and staff.

Business	Primary category (example)	Sensible additional categories	To avoid
Gym with classes	Gym	Pilates studio, yoga studio, if there are dedicated classes and instructors	“Personal trainer” if nobody offers it as a service
Running shop	Sporting goods store or running shoe store, if it’s on the list	Sportswear store	Categories for brands you sell but don’t represent
Association that organises a race	The category of the venue or the association	None, if there are no other activities	Creating a listing just for the event

The category examples are indicative: the list changes over time and should be checked when you fill in the listing.

A frequent case with events: a race or a festival doesn’t have a permanent venue open to the public, so it generally doesn’t have its own listing. The listing belongs to the organiser or the venue; the event is communicated through a post and a dedicated page on the website.

Services, description and attributes: what should you write?

These are the fields that complete relevance. Google uses them to understand whether the listing answers searches that are more specific than the category, such as “beginners’ pilates class” or “gait analysis”.

Services

In the services section you can choose items suggested for your category or add custom services, with price and description. The service name must not contain prices or phone numbers, otherwise it will be rejected.

List your services in your customers’ words, one per item, with a description of one or two sentences. For a gym: “Mat pilates class”, “Initial posture assessment”. For a running shop: “Treadmill gait analysis”.

Description

The description has a limit of 750 characters and doesn’t allow links or HTML code; the guidelines also rule out promotions, prices and offers. A three-part structure works well: who you are and where you are, what you do and for whom, and what sets you apart in a verifiable way (years in business, specialisms, services others don’t offer). Keywords help, but inside sentences a customer will enjoy reading.

Attributes

Attributes are the yes/no boxes: wheelchair accessibility, Wi-Fi, payment methods, parking, services offered. Some you fill in yourself because they’re facts; others Google derives from what customers who have visited the business report. It’s worth filling them all in, because they answer specific filters and questions (“gym with parking”, “accessible shop”).

Opening hours

Wrong opening hours are the easiest negative review to avoid. As well as standard hours, the listing lets you set special hours for public holidays and closures: updating them before August (when many Italian businesses close) and before Christmas is one of the most useful tasks of the year.

Which photos should you upload, and under what rules?

Photos are the part of the listing people look at to decide whether to go in. Google asks for JPG or PNG files between 10 KB and 5 MB, with a recommended resolution of 720 × 720 pixels and a minimum of 250 × 250, in focus, well lit and without heavy filters. The content policies for photos, videos and posts prohibit, among other things, images that don’t represent the business.

What to upload: the entrance from the street, which helps first-time visitors recognise the place; the spaces (weights room and studio for a gym, shop window and interior for a shop, the set-up room and access points for a venue); the people who work there. Stock photos are no use: people opening the listing want to see your space.

Customers can upload photos too: you can’t stop them, but you can make sure yours are more numerous and more recent.

How do you ask for reviews without breaking the rules?

Reviews are the prominence signal over which a local business has the most control: according to Google, more reviews and positive ratings tend to improve your position in local results. But the rules on asking for them are precise, and breaking them leads to reviews being removed.

According to the page on prohibited and restricted content, it is not allowed to:

• offer discounts, freebies, money or services in exchange for a review, or for changing or removing a negative one;
• ask only satisfied customers for reviews or discourage negative ones (filtering in advance who can leave a review);
• ask for specific content to be included in the text;
• post reviews not based on a genuine experience, including those from employees, relatives or accounts run by the same person.

What you can do, and what works, is ask everyone, every time, at the right moment. Google provides a link or QR code for requesting reviews directly from the listing.

Timing matters: for a gym after the first month, for a shop after the purchase, for an event in the days immediately afterwards.

In our experience, consistency counts for more than spikes: ten reviews a month for a year tell the story of a living business better than a hundred reviews all arriving in a single week. Google itself flags unusual volumes of reviews in a short time as suspicious.

How should you reply to reviews, positive and negative?

We reply to all of them, although Google makes clear there’s no need to publicly thank every reviewer. The reply is read by the person who wrote the review, but above all by future customers. Google’s tips for replying call for courteous, professional replies that never share the customer’s private information.

For positive reviews, it’s enough to say thank you in a way that isn’t copied and pasted, mentioning a detail from the review. “Thanks Paola, we’re glad the Tuesday evening class has helped you get back into a regular routine” is worth more than ten identical “Thanks so much!” replies.

For negative reviews we use a four-step approach:

1. Thank them for the feedback, without irony.
2. Acknowledge the problem if there was one, without lengthy explanations.
3. Say what has changed or what will be done.
4. Take the discussion off the listing: a phone number, an email address, the name of the person handling it.

An example for a shop: “Good morning Marco, you’re right: on Saturday there were only two of us all afternoon and the wait was too long. From this month there are three of us on Saturdays. If you like, write to us at shop@… and we’ll get back to you about the fitting you weren’t able to have.” False or offensive reviews can be reported, but Google doesn’t intervene on opinions: a sincere negative review stays.

Are posts still worth it?

Yes, but not for your ranking. There are three types of posts: update (text, photo or video and a button with a link), offer (with a title and dates) and event (with a title, dates and start and end times). They appear in the listing and let you say things the other fields don’t.

Google doesn’t publish a recommended frequency and doesn’t state that posts improve your ranking. Their value lies with the people who open the listing: a gym’s open day, a shop’s sale with its validity dates, the next race with the entry link. We use them as a shop window for news, not as a weekly obligation.

Two rules from the content policies: it’s best not to put phone numbers in the text of a post, because Google may reject it if it can’t verify them (use the “Call now” button instead), and no automatically generated text stuffed with keywords. The post will be rejected or, worse, nobody will read it.

What happened to Questions and answers?

The public Questions and answers section, where anyone could ask a question about a listing and anyone could answer, has been withdrawn. Google shut down the dedicated programming interface on 3 November 2025; in December it confirmed the section was changing, and in the months that followed it disappeared from listings, replaced by Ask Maps, answers generated by Gemini. Answers to questions about a place are therefore generated by Google’s artificial intelligence based on what it finds: listing details, reviews, photos, website.

For anyone managing a listing, one important thing changes: you can no longer write the answer to “is there parking?” or “can I try it without a membership?” yourself. You can only make sure the right answer is already in the sources Google reads: fully completed attributes and services, a description that addresses the most common doubts, an FAQ page on the website, and review replies that clarify opening hours, indicative prices and access. It’s the same work we do to get cited in AI answers, and we explain it on our SEO and GEO service page.

The listing’s chat has gone too: Google shut down Business Profile messaging on 31 July 2024. Today contact goes through the phone, the website and booking buttons where available.

Why must your name, address and phone number be identical everywhere?

In local SEO this is called NAP consistency (Name, Address, Phone): the business’s name, address and phone number must be written the same way on the listing, the website, social media and directories (Pagine Gialle, the Italian Yellow Pages, industry portals, booking platforms). Google cross-checks these sources; if it finds different versions, it’s less sure they refer to the same business.

The guidelines for representing your business on Google add a rule many people ignore: the name on the listing must be the real one, used on your signage, website and documents. No slogans, no city or area unless they’re part of the real name, no added keywords: “Palestra Rossi” yes, “Palestra Rossi Fitness Pilates Turin Centre” no. Listings that break the guidelines can be suspended.

In the first days of work we check the listing, the website’s footer and contact page, the about section of the social profiles and the directories that come up when you search for the business’s name. The most common differences are small: “C.so” versus “Corso” (the abbreviated and full forms of “avenue” in Italian addresses), an old landline number, the name with or without “ASD” (the abbreviation for an Italian amateur sports association). They’re fixed starting from the most visible sources.

How do you measure whether the listing is working?

In the listing’s Performance section you’ll find interactions (calls, direction requests, website clicks, bookings where available), profile views and the searches people used to find it.

To understand what happens after the click to the website, it’s worth adding UTM parameters to the listing’s link, for example utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=scheda-google. That way, in Google Analytics, visits from the listing can be told apart from those from normal results.

An example of how to read the data, with figures invented for illustration: a gym compares October with September, after changing its primary category, adding services and uploading new photos.

Metric	September	October	Interpretation
Profile views	1,900	2,300	More people see the listing
Searches for “pilates”	40	95	Relevance for the service has grown
Calls	28	31	Stable
Website clicks	60	85	More interest in checking opening hours and prices
Trials booked from the website with the listing’s UTM	6	11	The figure that matters for the gym

September and October aren’t equivalent months for a gym: when the data is available, it’s better to compare with the same month the previous year. And positions on the map need checking from different points in the area, because they change with the searcher’s location.

Where to start: gyms, events, shops

If time is short, this is the order in which we would work, starting from what carries the most weight.

Business	First three things to do	Then
Gym or sports centre	Correct primary category, services with the names of the classes, updated special hours	Photos of the studios and instructors every season, reviews requested after the first month, posts for open days and new classes
Event organiser or venue	A listing for the real venue, an event post for every date, an event page on the website	Photos of past events showing access and parking, reviews requested from participants in the following days
Shop	Name identical to the sign, complete attributes (payments, accessibility, collection), photos of the window and interior	Reviews requested after purchase, offer posts with precise dates for sales and seasonal changes

How the listing fits into the rest of a gym’s marketing (social media, campaigns, email) is explained in our article on marketing for gyms. For businesses based in Turin or its province, we also handle the local side as an SEO agency in Turin.

Mistakes to avoid

Adding keywords to the name. It’s against the guidelines and can lead to suspension. The name is the one on your sign.

Leaving summer opening hours in place in October. Wrong hours generate negative reviews and wasted phone calls.

Asking only happy customers for reviews. It’s prohibited, and Google removes reviews obtained improperly. Ask everyone.

Replying to negative reviews to win the argument. Readers judge the tone, not who’s right.

Creating several listings for the same location. A business is entitled to one listing per location. Duplicates are prohibited, cause display problems on Maps and in Search, and confuse customers.

Treating the listing as a one-off job. Photos, opening hours and services go out of date. A check once a month is enough.

Listing checklist

• Listing claimed and verified, with at least two owners within the business.
• Name identical to the sign; primary category checked against competitors’ listings.
• Services, description (within 750 characters) and attributes filled in.
• Standard and special opening hours up to date.
• Photos of the entrance, interior, main service and people, refreshed every season.
• Review link in emails, on receipts or at reception; a reply to every review.
• Name, address and phone number identical on the listing, website, social media and directories.
• Website link with UTM parameters; an FAQ page on the website.

Want a Google listing that brings in local customers?

For local businesses, we start by reviewing the listing and the business’s details across the web: category, services, photos, reviews and replies, consistency between listing, website and directories. Then we fix whatever is holding it back, build the website pages that support the listing and measure calls, direction requests and enquiries. It’s part of our work on SEO and GEO; if you also need someone to produce photos, videos and posts for the listing and for social media, you’ll find how we work on the page for our marketing and communications agency in Turin.

You can book a call with Federico or write to us via the contact form.

Frequently asked questions

How long does it take to see results from optimising the listing?

Google says that reviewing changes usually takes about 10 minutes, but sometimes up to 30 days. The effects of reviews and consistent data show up over months, not weeks. That’s why it’s best to measure over long periods.

Can I have a listing if I work at customers’ premises and don’t receive customers?

Yes. Google lets you hide your address and specify a service area by city or postcode. What isn’t allowed is using an address where you don’t work, such as a PO box.

Can negative reviews be deleted?

No, if they’re genuine. You can only report those that break the policies: false, offensive, off-topic or written by someone who was never a customer. For the rest, the best thing is a courteous, concrete reply.

What replaces the Questions and answers section?

Answers about places are increasingly generated by Google’s artificial intelligence, drawing on the listing, reviews, photos and website. The way to influence them is to have complete information on the listing and an FAQ page on your website.