Google Business Profile

The fastest way onto the map.

Your profile is the one piece of local search that can move in weeks rather than months. It is also the piece most businesses claimed once, filled in halfway, and never opened again.

Check my profile, free $250/mo

Why this is urgent

Your profile is working right now, with or without you.

It is live. It is being shown to people in your service area today, and it is the first thing most of them will ever see about your business. Whatever it currently says is what they are deciding on.

And you are not the only one who can change it. Google lets the public suggest edits to your hours and details, and lets anyone answer questions on your listing. That is not a loophole, it is how the product works. An unmanaged profile is not a blank space, it is a page about your business that other people are allowed to write on.

The difference

Same business, two listings.

Nothing here needs a new website, a bigger budget or a rebrand. It is the same company either way. One of these is just filled in.

Claimed, then forgotten

Actively managed

The one on the left is not being punished by Google. It is just giving Google almost nothing to work with, and giving the customer even less.

What I actually do

Three kinds of work, not six chores.

Control

Own the listing, then fix what it says

Claiming is where a surprising number of these start. Profiles get verified by a former employee, a franchise head office, or an agency that has since disappeared, and until that is untangled nothing else can be changed.

Claim and verify, including recovering a profile someone else controls
Primary category chosen against what your best-ranking competitors use, which is the single strongest lever on the profile
Secondary categories, services and attributes, all filled in rather than left to Google to guess
A description written for a person that still says plainly what you do and where

Activity

A profile that looks alive

Google can tell the difference between a listing that is maintained and one that was filled in once. So can the customer looking at it, which is the part that actually converts.

Photos on a schedule: exterior, interior, team, and real work you have finished
Posts kept current, so the profile is not showing an offer that expired last spring
Questions answered by you, before a stranger answers them for you
Hours right, including the holiday hours that send people to a locked door

Reviews

The part that compounds

Google names reviews directly as a prominence signal, and they are also the last thing a customer reads before calling. Review work is the one part of this tier that keeps paying after you stop.

A request that goes out after every job, so the count grows steadily instead of in bursts
Every review answered, including the bad ones, which is a ranking input and a sales page at once
A path for handling an unfair review that does not make it worse

Where this stops

This is a listing, not a strategy.

Google names three things behind local rankings: relevance, distance and prominence. This tier moves relevance hard and contributes to prominence through reviews and citations. It does not touch your website, which is where the rest of prominence lives, and it cannot create pages for the towns you want work from.

So there is a ceiling, and in a competitive market you will meet it. If you already know your website is the problem, skip this tier and start at Local SEO instead.

Pricing

$250/mo, month to month.

Flat $250/month, month to month. No setup fee and no larger first invoice. One number, the same every month, and you can stop whenever you like. Getting your details listed correctly across the directories is included rather than billed as a setup fee, which is how most of this is normally sold.

This is the cheapest thing I sell and the one with the shortest wait, which is why it is usually the right place to start if you are not sure yet. At this price a business worth $900 a customer needs about one extra job a month for it to have paid for itself three times over.

Ready for more than the listing?

Local SEO runs From $500/mo. It keeps everything on this page and adds your website: service pages, pages for the towns you serve, and links from local sources.

Questions

The ones I actually get asked.

Is this the same as GMB, Google My Business, or Google Maps SEO?

Yes, all of them. Google My Business was renamed Google Business Profile in 2021, so GMB SEO, GBP optimization and Google Maps SEO all describe this same work. The map pack in search and the results in Google Maps are powered by the same profile, so optimizing for one optimizes for both.

How much does Google Business Profile optimization cost?

Flat $250/month, month to month. No setup fee and no larger first invoice. Most Google Business Profile management is sold at somewhere between $125 and $400 a month with a $300 to $500 setup fee on top of it. Getting your listings built out correctly is included here instead.

How fast does it work?

This is the fastest-moving part of local search, because it does not wait on Google recrawling and reassessing a website. A neglected profile that gets properly categorized, filled in and active often moves inside the first 30 days. Review-driven gains build over 60 to 90 days and keep going.

Can you rank a business that has no website?

Yes. A profile can rank in the map pack without a website, and for a service business whose customers call rather than browse, that can be enough on its own. It does cap you, though. A website is one of the prominence signals Google names, so with no site you are competing with one hand behind your back against anyone who has one.

What is the difference between this and Local SEO?

This tier works on your listing. Local SEO works on your listing and your website together, adding service pages, pages for the towns you serve, and links from local sources. If your website is decent and your profile is not, start here. If neither is working, From $500/mo for Local SEO is the honest answer and this tier will only take you so far.

Do I have to stay on it once the profile is fixed?

No, it is month to month. But the profile is not a project that finishes. Posts go stale, competitors add categories, the public suggests edits, and reviews stop arriving the moment nobody is asking for them. Most of what this tier buys after the first two months is the profile not sliding back.

Free audit

See what your profile looks like now.

The audit checks your Google Business Profile alongside your site's performance and whether AI assistants can find you. It runs automatically and lands in your inbox in about three minutes.

You get the findings whether or not you hire me. If your profile is already in good shape, the audit will say so and you can keep your $250/mo.