Google Business Profile: the free lever shop owners keep neglecting
Updated: 2 days ago
Every week we open a new client's Google account and find the same scene: a Google Business Profile created in a hurry three years ago, two blurry photos, wrong opening hours and five reviews left unanswered. Meanwhile the Wix Studio website cost several thousand euros and the shop owner wonders why the phone does not ring more often.
The Google profile is free, it shows up before your website on most local searches, and yet it is the most neglected tool we come across.
Why your Google profile comes before your website
Type the name of your shop, or "bakery" followed by your neighbourhood, on a phone. What shows up first is not your website: it is the Google Maps block with three profiles, their ratings, their photos and a Call button. Your website comes below that, when it comes at all.
For a local business, the Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is the real home page.
Google says it plainly in its own help centre: a complete and up-to-date profile gets more direction requests and more clicks to the website than an incomplete one.
We do not need official figures to see it: in our projects, a shop owner who goes from a bare-bones profile to a complete one sees calls from Google rise noticeably within two or three months, without spending a single euro on ads.
The contrast with the website budget is striking. A well-built Wix Studio site takes money and time. The Google profile takes one hour of serious work up front, then twenty minutes a month. The effort-to-result ratio is unbeatable, and that is exactly why it gets forgotten: what is free looks optional.
What a complete profile really contains
A "complete" profile in Google's sense is not just a name and an address. Here are the fields we fill in systematically with our clients, in order of priority:
The primary category and the secondary categories. This is the most important field and the one most often set wrong. A caterer who declares itself a "restaurant" does not show up on catering searches.
Opening hours, including special hours. Bank holidays, long weekends, the annual August closure: Google asks for this information and displays "Hours may differ" when you do not answer. A customer who finds the door closed does not come back.
Photos. Storefront, interior, team, flagship products. About ten sharp photos taken on a phone in daylight are enough. Profiles with photos get far more clicks than profiles without, and Google has documented this for years.
The description, services and products. 300 to 750 characters that say what you do, for whom, and where. The words your customers type should be in there.
The link to your Wix site, and the right links. Main link to the home page, but also a booking link, a menu link or an appointment link when the category allows it.
Attributes. Wheelchair access, terrace, contactless payment, Wi-Fi, click and collect: these are filters Google offers to users and that you leave empty.
Reviews: the field everyone dreads
Reviews are scary. Our clients often tell us they would rather not ask for them "so as not to provoke the bad ones". The opposite happens: a business that never asks for reviews only gets those from unhappy customers, because they are the only ones motivated enough to write.
Asking your satisfied customers for reviews dilutes the bad ones in a mass of good ones.
In practice, Google provides a short review link in your dashboard. Print it as a QR code on the counter, add it to the signature of your quotes and emails, and put it in the confirmation email of Wix Bookings or Wix Stores. Ask at the right moment: right after a successful service, not three weeks later.
Reply to every review, good and bad, politely, factually and in your own voice. A negative review with a calm and precise answer reassures a future customer more than a 5-star rating with no comment at all. And never cheat: Google detects fake reviews, and so do customers.
An example: the home decor shop that had everything except a profile
A home decor shop we work with, in the centre of a mid-sized town, had a nice Wix Studio site with an online store, an active Instagram page and a Google profile never opened since it was created.
Three photos, no description, opening hours from Monday to Saturday even though the shop closes on Mondays, a rating of 3.8 from 6 reviews, two of them unanswered.
In one afternoon we fixed the category and the hours, added twenty photos, wrote the description, linked the profile to the online store and wired the review link into the Wix order confirmation email. The owner asked every happy customer for a review for six weeks.
Three months later the profile showed 4.7 from 41 reviews, calls from Google had more than doubled according to the profile's own statistics, and in-store visits had followed. The website had not changed by a single line. What had changed was what people saw before the website.
The mistakes we see most often
After several dozen profiles put back in order, the same mistakes keep coming back. Check that you are not on the list:
The profile is not claimed: Google created it automatically, nobody manages it, and anyone can "suggest an edit".
The Google account that manages it belongs to a former intern or a former agency, and nobody has the password any more.
The profile name is stuffed with keywords ("Smith Plumbing cheap emergency repair"): this breaks Google's rules and can get the profile suspended.
The opening hours do not match those on the Wix site, and neither does the phone number. Google hates contradictory information.
The profile links to a site under construction or to a Facebook page instead of the website.
No post for months, even though Google lets you publish news, offers and events that show up directly in the profile.
Where to start
Take back control: search for your business on Google, click "Own this business?" or sign in at business.google.com with the company account, never a personal one.
Go through every field: primary category, secondary categories, hours and special hours, phone, address, link to your Wix site, attributes, description.
Add ten to twenty recent, sharp photos: storefront, interior, team, products, and add a new one every month.
Grab your review link, turn it into a QR code, and wire it into your Wix confirmation emails. Reply to every review within 48 hours.
Put a twenty-minute appointment in your calendar every month: one post, the month's hours, new reviews, questions asked on the profile.
What we take away
The Google Business Profile is free, it comes before your website on most local searches, and one hour of serious work is enough to bring it up to standard. When the phone does not ring, your website is rarely the culprit: it is often what Google shows before it.
A complete profile, photos, reviews you reply to, accurate hours and a clean link to your Wix site: that is the starter kit. The rest is consistency.
It is also a job you can hand over. We set it up for you: we put your Google profile back in order, connect it properly to your Wix Studio site (links, hours, booking, review request email), and leave you with a twenty-minute monthly routine. Book a slot here or have a look at our Wix services.
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