For a lot of Australian SMEs, Google Business Profile is the single most valuable piece of marketing they own — and the most neglected. It's the panel that appears on the right of Google search and inside Google Maps when someone looks up your business or a service near them. It's free, it's yours to control, and for local and service businesses it often does more work than a website ever will.
Why the profile matters more than you'd think
When someone searches for a plumber, a cafe, or an accountant "near me", Google rarely sends them straight to a website. It shows a map with a short list of businesses, each with a star rating, opening hours, and a photo. That list — the "local pack" — is drawn almost entirely from Business Profile data. If your profile is thin or out of date, you're competing for attention with one hand tied behind your back, no matter how good your actual service is.
The three broad signals Google weighs are relevance (does your profile match what they searched for), distance (how close you are to the searcher), and prominence (how established and well-reviewed you appear). You can't move your premises, but you have direct influence over the other two.
Get the fundamentals right first
Before any clever tactics, make the basics accurate and complete. Google favours profiles it can trust.
- Claim and verify the profile so you actually control it. Unverified or unclaimed listings can drift with old information Google has scraped from elsewhere.
- Business name exactly as it appears on your signage and paperwork — resist the urge to stuff keywords into it, which breaches Google's guidelines and risks suspension.
- Primary category chosen precisely, then add relevant secondary categories. This is one of the strongest relevance signals, so pick the category that describes what you actually do, not an aspirational one.
- Consistent name, address and phone number across your website, socials and directories. Mismatches confuse Google and erode trust.
- Opening hours kept current, including public holidays. Nothing frustrates a customer faster than driving to a "closed" business the profile said was open.
The parts almost everyone skips
Two features quietly separate active profiles from dormant ones.
Photos. Businesses that add photos regularly tend to get more clicks through to their website and more requests for directions. Add real, current images of your premises, your team and your work — not stock. Update them seasonally so the profile looks alive.
Google Posts and the Q&A section. Posts let you publish short updates, offers or news directly to the profile. The Q&A is public and, crucially, anyone can answer — including a confused member of the public. Seed it yourself with the questions customers actually ask, and answer them properly.
The Products and Services lists are also worth completing in plain language, because they feed relevance for the specific things people search for.
Reviews: earn them, then respond to all of them
Reviews influence both your ranking and, more importantly, whether a human chooses you. The durable approach is simple: ask happy customers at the moment they're happy, make it easy with a direct review link, and never offer incentives (which Google prohibits and which taints the reviews that follow).
Reply to every review — the glowing ones and the difficult ones. A calm, specific, non-defensive reply to a negative review often reassures future readers more than the complaint itself worries them. Responding also signals to Google that the profile is actively managed.
Treat it as a living asset
The mistake we see most often isn't a bad profile — it's a set-and-forget one. A profile that was accurate two years ago is now quietly wrong: old hours, a departed team member's photo, a stale offer. Put a recurring reminder in the calendar (monthly is plenty for most) to add a photo or post, clear new Q&A and reviews, and confirm the details still hold. That small habit compounds.
If you'd like to think about where visibility fits alongside the rest of your business, our Growth hub covers marketing and demand more broadly. Google Business Profile is simply the highest-leverage place to start — because it's free, it's under your control, and most of your competitors have stopped paying attention to theirs.
About the author
Andrew Northcott
Founder & Chairman, Valont
Andrew is the founder and chairman of Valont and the parent group Wattlestone. He has spent two decades building and running Australian SMEs, and writes about the realities of ownership — cash, people, systems, and the decisions that compound.
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