Content Marketing Glossary

  • What is Google My Business?

What is Google My Business?

Google My Business

Google My Business is the legacy name for what’s now called Google Business Profile - the free Google product that lets businesses manage how they appear across Google Search and Google Maps. Controls the business listing, hours, photos, posts, and customer reviews shown when someone searches for a local business or category.

The single most underrated marketing surface for any business with physical locations or local service areas. Free, high-intent traffic that almost every local search delivers - and most businesses leave the profile half-completed.

What the profile actually controls

Basic listing info. Name, address, phone, website, category, hours, attributes (wheelchair accessible, outdoor seating, etc.). The data that powers the knowledge panel and Maps result.

Photos. Profile photo, cover, additional photos. Photos drive engagement substantially - listings with 10+ recent photos consistently outperform listings with 0-3.

Reviews. Customer reviews and your responses. Both star rating and review volume influence local ranking; response rate and quality influence engagement.

Posts and updates. Short posts that appear in the listing - events, offers, news, updates. Lower visibility than the rest of the profile but still indexed and useful.

Q&A. Customer-asked questions about the business. Often answered by other customers (sometimes wrongly). Worth monitoring and answering yourself.

Booking and messaging. Direct booking integration for some categories; direct messaging for nearly all. Many businesses get more first-touch contact via Google Business Profile messaging than through their website forms.

Why most local businesses underuse this

Three patterns:

Set-and-forget. Profile created in 2018, address and hours filled in, never touched again. Photos are stale, reviews unanswered, no posts. Functional but missing 70% of the available value.

Treating reviews as bonus rather than infrastructure. Asking happy customers to leave reviews on a regular basis substantially shifts both ranking and conversion from listing impressions. Most local businesses leave this entirely to organic chance.

Ignoring the insights data. Google Business Profile shows what queries triggered your listing, what actions people took (calls, direction requests, website clicks). This data is gold for understanding actual local search behaviour and most owners never look at it.

What good profile maintenance looks like

Three simple habits:

Add photos monthly. Real photos from the business - not stock images. Listings with regular photo additions consistently get more engagement than listings with frozen photo libraries.

Respond to every review within 48 hours. Positive reviews: thank them by name, reference what they mentioned. Negative reviews: don’t argue, acknowledge specifically what went wrong, offer to fix it. Both behaviours are visible to future customers.

Ask customers for reviews systematically. Best done at the moment of completion (transaction done, service delivered). A simple text or printed card with the review link gets a much better response rate than asking later.

An example

A chain of 4 local cafes had profiles set up properly but otherwise neglected. Average reviews per location: 32. Rating: 4.1.

The pivot: baristas trained to ask happy customers for reviews at the moment of payment (printed cards with QR codes). Manager response to every new review within 24 hours. Weekly photo additions.

Six months later: reviews per location jumped to 180+. Rating climbed to 4.6 - new positive volume drowned out legacy negatives. Foot traffic attributable to Google Maps discovery lifted ~25% per location. Free channel, substantial impact, most businesses leave it on the table.

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