Before anyone reaches a website, they have already met the business. Not in person, and not on the homepage either. On the panel that sits to the right of the search results: the map, the photos, the opening hours, the reviews.
For a huge number of local businesses, that panel gets more views than the website ever will. It is free. Google built it, Google maintains it, and Google will show it to anyone within a five mile radius searching for what that business does. And yet, in our experience auditing local businesses, most of these listings are half finished, propped up on whatever got entered the day the profile was claimed and never touched again.
That is worth fixing before anything else gets spent on marketing. Here is where to start.
Opening Hours Are Not Decoration
Nothing loses a customer faster than a wasted trip. If the listing says open and the door is locked, that customer does not try again later. They go somewhere else and they remember why.
Bank holidays are the usual failure point. Standard weekly hours get set up once and forgotten, and then Easter Monday or the late May bank holiday arrives and the listing is wrong. Google now prompts businesses to set special hours for these dates. It takes two minutes. Most businesses never do it.
Photographs Do the Selling Before the Website Gets a Chance
Stock photography on a Google Business Profile is obvious to anyone who looks, and people do look. So does the one blurry shot taken on a phone in 2019, half in shadow, showing a shopfront that has since had new signage.
Real, current photographs of the actual place tell a customer what to expect before they arrive. That matters more for some sectors than others: a salon, a restaurant, a showroom, a workshop. But it matters for all of them, because a listing with recent, honest photos reads as a business that is actually open and actually cares what it looks like.
List Every Service On Its Own, Not Bundled Into a Category
People do not search for an industry. They search for the specific thing they need: emergency boiler repair, wedding hair trial, commercial window cleaning. A profile that only lists a broad category misses every one of those specific searches, because Google matches services, not sectors.
Going through the services section and listing each one individually takes longer than it sounds, but it is the single change most likely to bring in searches that were previously invisible to the business entirely.
Write the Description Like a Person, Not a Brochure
The business description field gets ignored or gets filled with the kind of language nobody actually says out loud. A description written plainly, for a human, with the town named once and naturally, does two jobs at once: it reads well to a person deciding whether to click, and it gives Google a clean, relevant signal for local search.
Reply to Every Review, Including the One That Stings
Reviews left unanswered look neglected, and the businesses that reply only to the five star ones look like they are hiding from something. Replying to all of them, including the bad one, politely and without arguing the point in public, does more for trust than the review itself. Anyone reading reviews is really reading how the business behaves when things go wrong.
Post Occasionally, Because Google Expects Current Information
The posts feature on Google Business Profile expires after seven days. That is a deliberate signal from Google: it wants to see a listing that is actually being looked after, not one that was set up once and abandoned. An occasional post, an offer, an update, a photo from a recent job, keeps the profile active in Google's eyes as well as a customer's.
None of This Needs an Agency, But the Order Matters
An hour and somebody who cares will fix most of the above. No budget, no brief, no agency required.
Where it gets interesting is what happens after. If the listing is right, fully populated, current, and the phone still is not ringing, that is the point at which the website is genuinely worth examining. Too many businesses do this backwards: they rebuild the website first and leave the free listing that customers actually see beforehand untouched.
We do a lot of website work at CREATE, but we would rather tell a business to sort its Google listing first than take a website brief that was never the actual problem. If the profile is solid and enquiries are still thin, that is when it is worth talking to us about what the website, and the traffic reaching it, is actually doing.
