How To Optimize A Google Business Profile (Free Checklist For 2025)

0:00 in this video I'm going to show how to optimize a Google business profile this is the exact process I use for clients to get them to rank as high as possible in the map results now if you stay till the end of the video I'm going to be giving away my exact Google business profile optimization checklist that you could use inside your own business to maximize your local rankings and results so for Google Business um what we're going to get into is my complete checklist here we're going to go through each basically each line item and I'm going to show how to check these things and ultimately how you want to make the changes now ultimately when you're making these changes it's really important to start tracking some of your data before you start making changes because we really want to be able to identify what's actually working so I

0:45 really like to run these map grid scan reports you could use a tool like bright local uh local Falcon is another one I really like to run these grids and what this is going to allow you to do is you can look at this one from September it shows where my location is and then where I'm ranking in the maps at these different distances around my location so right away we can see I have six high ranking grid points which means I'm in the top three being in the top three is really critical because that's where you're actually going to be visible if we type in storage units in Austin Texas what we'll see is the three map results here so this is ultimately what we're tracking if you're not in the top three somebody has to click more places to actually find your your location no matter what type of

1:31 business you are so getting into the top three is ultimately your first goal so right away we can tell I'm only in the top three at a few spots so after implementing this checklist that I'm going to walk through we could see the same business now has almost complete coverage around their location here you can see there's 46 that are in the top three and very many of those are either one or two there's only a few spots left that really we really need to focus on to Max this out now I like look at the total grid points but also the average map rank so we can see our average was about 8.8 and now it's up to about a 2.1 um and the nice thing about Google business is depending on your competition level you can see results within the first three months sometimes with with within even one or two months

2:18 we see a lot of movement it depends on your Market depends on your industry and the competitors but this is not uncommon if you're implementing the right things so as far as the actual checklist here so what I like to do is open up this checklist and then open up my Google business profile so you can go to business.com to access this we're not going to go through how to verify a Google business profile we'll cover that in a separate video and there's a lot of free training on that already but this is really the first step you need to get your profile verified if you want to actually rank in the map listings so what I do in the audit I just check if we're verified or not sometimes I'll work with a client and they don't realize they actually never ver verifi their location or never set it up so that's uh what we're looking for here is

3:04 just is it verified um now this is a quick thing to check off as far as the structure here so I have in these columns kind of like an impact level uh usually what I'll do when I'm conducting one of these audits I'll mark each item pass or fail that way I can filter to all the items that were failed at the end so I know exactly what I need to change and then I'll actually track is it implemented so if I mark this item fail I want to be able to to know did I actually implement this or did I just audit it so then ultimately we'll be able to make sure all the changes actually get implemented which is really common to run an audit and forget to actually Implement some of the items as you're doing a bunch of other things so that's why these two columns uh are in this audit so next what we want to look at is keywords in the Google business

3:50 profile name now I don't suggest stuffing keywords in the name but this is a ranking factor and sometimes what you'll find is you have a small competitor who has an exact key word in their business name and they're actually ranking well because of it um you can try this I would say try it at your own risk what what often happens here is um you you do risk your profile being uh suspended there's a bunch of issues a lot of times what happens is your name just gets reverted back so if you add something to it it'll get reverted back but I wouldn't recommend doing this um if you're in one city sometimes it does make sense to get a DBA um file a DBA for doing business as for the actual keyword which name you

4:37 want and then you have a legitimate name that you're using and you're not just stuffing keywords in if the keywords are valuable enough that strategy can sometimes make sense but overall what I usually recommend is don't really worry about this focus on everything else and you should be able to get movement if you're doing everything else right you shouldn't need to do this I like to check cuz sometimes we'll get a client and they've really stuffed a lot of keywords in their name and we'll ually your recommend against that so that's kind of the reason this is in the in the audit here now after that we're going to look at categories so when you go to your Google business profile uh you'll see your category right here but when you click edit profile this is now going to pull up all the information we could change so this is how you would change your business name uh but we want to do is go to edit categories now this uh plugin here you

5:25 won't see this fine categories button unless you sign up for this gmbb everywhere to tool um again you don't need this tool but um that's why these items are showing up in my Google business but when I go to edit category you want to set your primary category and then all the additional categories are relevant now only use additional categories that are actually relevant to what you do you don't want to just pick categories that are somewhat relevant if it's really not what you offer so really make sure you're being thoughtful about the categories now often it's hard to determine what should be the primary and what should be the secondary for self storage because we work with these businesses specifically we know the exact structure it should pretty much always be self storage facility as primary and the storage facility as additional and then any other type of storage that the business offers if you have in another industry a

6:13 lot of times what you can do is actually just search the keyword and check what the top three ranking results are doing so let's do instead we'll do um let's just do plumber now in this search and let's see what the categories are being used so right away I could see plumber plumber and plumber so that same exact category is being used for all of these if I click into the result here and pull up the number one result again we could take a look here and right in this menu here as I scroll down you'll see all of these businesses this one's pretty straightforward they're all using plumber as the main uh category now

6:59 let's do storage units and here we can see self storage facility is the main category in all the top ranking results and I don't actually see anyone even using uh storage facility here so in these situations it's really straightforward which category you need to use um Let's do let's do another Market here just to see if we could find some different results so if we look through here same thing everybody's using uh storage facility as the primary category now let's try a search like this and let's see let's see if we do something like this where we actually so here we can see teeth whitening service cosmetic dentist dentist so see this is where

7:44 we're dental clinic we're starting to see a lot of variant in terms of category so if this is your primary service this is how you can do the analysis to try to figure out what uh category you should use in this case three out of the top four are using te weding Service as their category that could be an indication that you want to go that same route so that's usually how I'll do the analysis if you're familiar with an industry the nice thing is you'll start to get an understanding of the categories that are being used but really important to do this step properly now photos and media on the Google business profile so if we close out of this and we go to photos you can also just click photos here on your actual listing to see what you have but I like to click photos here and this gives you the option to add a logo and a

8:30 cover photo so this one does not have a cover photo so I would add one but you could also add your logo and then here's where you can manage all your media I like to and again this one has needs high quality images of the location it doesn't have those it has some videos which is good I want to have a mixture of photo and video on here ideally and what I like to look for is a couple things one do we have enough photos and video uh interior exterior photos of your team your staff photos with customers if you have them any kind of photos doing business are really important uh same thing with video and then once you you have uh these in place the next thing we want to do is look at how recent were photos and videos added I'd like to add new photos and videos at

9:15 least every quarter if you could do it monthly or every other month that's even better but just consistent updates to your media um can help overall just continue the activity on your profile so when I'm doing the audit that's what I'm looking for is do they have the right amount of photos and videos how many photos and videos do they have compared to their competitors I also like to look at the top three competitors and get a feel for how much media they have on their pages and their profiles and that'll inform how much we need to do so that's really what I'm looking for here and this is more of an ongoing thing and rather than just a one-time implementation now next what we want to do is just go through all the settings in Google business so you want to make sure your address your phone number and all the settings are correct so when we go back here and we go to edit

10:01 profile this is where we're going to go down this list one by one and make sure everything is set up correctly now your description is important um having a keyword in here doesn't really help ranking that much I tend to do it anyway like have my service and the name of my cities in the description it's not really a direct ranking Factor but as long as you do it in a way that reads well because people are going to see this description on your actual profile here so you want to make sure it reads well and is going to help people ultimately click on your profile and visit your website and ideally call you or convert so don't worry about stuffing keywords too much just make sure this reads well and it's compelling uh opening date is I like to fill in everything when possible so ideally this one would have the opening date that your business open filled in and

10:46 sometimes it'll say how many years you've been in business uh your phone number is really important um if you're using a tracking number like call rail or what converts what I like to do is put my real number as additional and the tracking number as the primary um and that'll allow you to track phone calls a lot of people will say about uh name address phone number it's really important for that to be consistent through your Google Business your directories your citations and your website I find the benefits of call tracking typically outweigh that so I wouldn't be worried about this if you really want to track phone calls to get an understanding of how many leads you're getting um that's how I would do it if you don't have call tracking you just need a primary phone number and that's it and that should match what your website shows then you want to put your website URL here now normally what I would do is I

11:34 would typically link to a location page this business here only has one location so we're we've chosen to link to the homepage but in general I prefer to go to uh the actual location page or this was a multilocation business you want to link directly to the page of this location you don't want to go to the homepage if you're a solo location you have the option of going to the homepage or if you or if you have a location page you can kind of choose which one makes sense for you now I like to add UTM tracking here there's a lot of different ways you can do this this is just how I do it there's no real right or wrong this will allow your Google Business data to show up separately inside your Google analytics now some people don't put local here they just keep it Google organic and then use the campaign I've

12:21 been doing the kind of this method just because I want it split out but you kind of can play around with this we're not going to go too deep into UTM tracking you could just copy this exactly if you want your Google analytics reports to maintain the same with your organic search data I would actually do it this way Source Google medium organic and then campaign you could say local or GBP and then you could use the campaign reporting to break out your Google Business traffic separately but this uh helps you evaluate if we go back to this result here the traffic coming from this vers the traffic coming from the regular organic results so you could actually see your conversions and your traff separately what's often interesting is the map results for a lot of the industries that I work in like Self Storage typically convert the best and

13:06 you can actually have your data prove that by setting up this UTM tracking so that's the main reason I do that now social profiles it's important I would link to all your social profiles you can see all the options here that Google has that you can link to so as many social profiles as you have I would link to them right here and it's going to show up on your profile uh your address it's important to make this consistent with the way it's written on your website make sure it's all dialed in uh the map pin as well if you click adjust you could actually move the map pin so in this case we're right on target where we need to be but if you found it was a little bit off it's important to line this up with your actual address so it's all dialed in now service area we're kind of testing on this one if adding a service area does anything um in general if you

13:55 have a physical location you don't always need a service area now if you're a business without a physical location and you're just a service area business well then these are very important and I would choose your top top locations that you service here um we're kind of testing if this actually helps us show up in other cities it doesn't really look like it does um but that's why it's filled in here now for your hours hours are also really important you want to make sure this matches what your website says um and you also want to use additional hours when they're needed so for some storage businesses you will have different office hours and access hours so you could actually click access and set up separate access hours so you could have different hours when you have a customer service rep available and different hours when people can access their facility so you can kind of look

14:42 through the options here but these are all your options for additional hours where if you have multiple sets of hours for different things you want to fill those in accurately here now after this you're going to get into a bunch of just settings at the bottom um we don't need to go into these too deep you can click on on each one and if any of these are relevant for you you can check off yes so basically what you want to do is just go through each of these and mark off the ones that are relevant to you um same thing here do you have parking options those are free parking on-site or paid parking um there's this recycling section what payments do you accept um and then service options if you have any of these or on-site services so the main thing here is just double check what's relevant for you and just make sure you

15:27 fill in everything and then that's really going to be your core settings on your Google business profile after that we're going to get into some extra items like q&as products and services and some different things so when I go here you'll notice there's products Services booking Q&A add update there's a lot of additional features here so what depending on your category you might have different options um so it's important to see based on your business type what options are available and then fully utilize them and fill limit for storage what we do is we set up products for the different units that they offer so in this case they have 5x 10 10 x10 they also have vehicle storage and then we also set up categories for those as well the product categories are

16:13 important because they actually show up right here what we should really do on this one is probably have separate categories for RV storage boat storage vehicle and then we'll actually get more of these buttons here showing up so that's something I would look to do with this facility but when you go to add a product you'll see all the options you can name it you can create your category you'll see I have two created but I can create a new one you want to add a photo if you want to show pricing you don't have to I generally like to but if depending on your business you don't have to and you could add a description and then you could add a a URL to go to and you want to build out as many of those as possible and you get this section now services are based on your categories what I like to do with Services is I like to always select any of the ones that Google is giving us that are relevant and then you could

16:59 also add custom ones so these are based on your category so if this facility had climate control I would want to select this um we do have online payment so we probably should select that and then what you want to do as well is you also want to fill in a description so this one does not have any descriptions so what I would go in and do is click on this and actually add a few sentences of a description now you can use some AI tools to help you write it and then just edit but adding the right services and then descriptions are important now this one has no automatic categories uh services from Google but you'll see this one does so again you want to check off the ones that Google is providing and then add any custom ones on top of it a lot of ways you can go with this sometimes we we'll write about like C excellent customer service we'll write about things like that easy access but

17:44 whatever you think is relevant for you and then if Google provides some suggested Services definitely utilize any of the ones that are relevant for you and then just fill in all the information now bookings what this does if you have like a calendar tool where people can book things you can set up a booking feature and you'll see it shows like this we were kind of testing it on the storage facility and just driving this to their location page where you could book units so in ideally this is more used for like a calendly or any like scheduling tool but it allows people to book a meeting with you right from your Google business profile or schedule an appointment now q&as are important what I like to do with q&as they show up right here is if any customer asks you something it's very important to answer

18:30 it but you don't have to wait for the a customer to ask I like to put in common questions somebody would have before converting and reaching out to me so in this case we're doing what type of things uh Vehicles do we store and you'll see we've answered each question ourselves is the facility secure what are the hours what are the amenities how do I rent a unit so all of those things you can put in here to ultimately help convergence so any question somebody may ask that you think will help conversion you can put that in right here now and that's kind of uh what the Q&A feature is for then we'll get to updates so updates are going to be your posting feature here this is where you could set up posts now these by themselves are not the most impactful thing but it does add this nice section

19:15 on your Google business profile that you can control the image the text there's call Now options there's learn more there's different call to actions on these I like to set up ideally at least a few of these per month I know some people try and do these daily some people do these once per week I lean to doing them more once a week or a few times per month but you can use scheduling tools there's a bunch of scheduling tools now that exist um but the main thing is here every month it's good to add at least a few of these so you just click on ADD update and then you could choose which option is relevant for you so typically most of you are going to do add update but if you have an event coming up you can do this and actually put in the details of the event if you have an offer or a discount you can do that here you could upload a custom image and then give details about the offer um and then for

20:04 General Uses the add update feature is good enough so what you want to do is add a photo write up a description you have about 1,500 characters and you want to choose the most relevant call to action I like to alternate these if there's multiple that are relevant for Self Storage I'll altern alternate between call now um if we want to get phone calls I'll use learn more sometimes I'll try order online and I'll link right to my rental page so whatever of these relevant um buy works as well um utilize the right one and it'll show up as the clickable link at the bottom of your post so those again you it's good to do on at least a monthly basis but ideally you do those weekly and those are really the main items here now only other thing I didn't

20:50 cover is this so Google will also give you ideas of things you can do right here so you'll see add update confirm holiday hours um add directions to your website if you click on these you could actually Implement some of these things right here I recommend doing as many of them as possible so I would just go through these one by one the first one is just your performance stats but adding a map to your website add amenity map any of these that are relevant to you you want to utilize now we didn't talk about reviews reviews are one of the most impactful ranking factors getting both more quantity and quality from your competitors so if we go here we'll be able to see our reviews now there's a couple things with reviews I like to reply to every review so in this case we're not replying to the reviews on this profile so we really

21:36 should be replying positive or negative you definitely want to reply to negative reviews because that's a chance for you to sort of make it right and even if the person leaving the negative review doesn't take it down future customers will see how you respond to that negative review so really important to do that properly and respond in a in a way where you're sort of showing people that you're trying to make the situation right and you're not necessarily being combative or arguing with the person right on your Google business profile because that could actually impact future conversions that you would have gotten if you didn't respond in a poor way so really important to respond to negative but I I think it's even important to respond to positive reviews I want I want to respond to everything just just to show the activity here now you want to try to generate reviews as many as you can really more important

22:23 though than getting a ton of them in like one day is more consistency over time so you want to make this a part of your weekly daily monthly business process where you're consistently asking customers to leave you a review and if you click this button you can actually get a link that you could send people that um will go directly there and there's even email WhatsApp and Facebook options so you want to make it as seamless as possible for you for people to leave you a review but really important after you implement all the technical changes to your Google Business building up your reviews is one of the main ways you can improve your rankings but not just rankings also your convergence if we go to this situation here and look at this so in this case the number one ranking result has the most reviews but sometimes the number

23:08 two or number three result has more reviews and a better star rating and if that's the case you can actually get more leads and conversions not even ranking in position one just because people scan the reviews so really important to not just for rankings but to actually get conversions and grow your business is building up these reviews now the reason it's important to that business start date is you'll actually see 45 years in business 10 years in business 10 years in business if you were to utilize that feature that's another thing this opening date that's another data point that Google can pull in about your business so right away that 45 years in business is going to help them get more conversion so definitely something um you'll want to consider and potentially adding and

23:54 that'll start to build up over time now if we go go back to the template here so those are kind of the the core things in this template we have some other ranking factors for local search so I'm going to record separate videos on these other factors like citations I know we got into reviews a little bit but also backlinks onpage SEO there's a lot of factors here Google Business tends to be the lowest hanging fruit and the thing I recommend doing as soon as possible and then sometimes that's enough to improve your rankings in some markets in other markets where there's more competition and sophistication you might have to go through this full local audit process and I do have a video on this full audit but those are kind of the core things I look at uh when optimizing a Google

24:40 business profile so if you want access to this Google business profile checklist I do have a newsletter where I give out free templates every month so just sign up for that I'll include a link in the description and if you can't find it or need help finding it just comment on the video and we'll get you access to the template