A prospect hears about you at a trade show or through a referral. Before writing to you, they type your name into Google. The first thing that shows is not your site: it is your Business Profile, with your hours, your photos and your reviews. An empty or outdated profile answers in your place, and it answers badly. Here are the ten actions to optimize your profile.

1. Fill in every field, no exceptions.

Google states in its documentation that complete profiles are favored in local results. And in any case, every empty field is a question the prospect asks without getting an answer. To fill in:

• Address and service area
• Hours, public holidays included
• Phone and website
• Opening date
• Payment methods

The most neglected field is the dumbest one: hours. A profile that shows “closed” on a working Tuesday, or ignores public holidays, sends calls to the competitor next door. Set a reminder for every seasonal schedule change.

2. Pick your primary category as close to your trade as possible.

The primary category tells Google which searches to show you for. Website designer and Marketing agency do not trigger the same queries. Take the most precise one that matches what you actually sell, not the broadest.

Secondary categories cover the rest of the business. Each must match a service you invoice: a category added to cast a wide net dilutes the primary one’s signal.

3. Write name, address and phone identically everywhere.

Google cross-references your profile with everything it finds elsewhere: your site, directories, your social profiles. If the company is “TeneX Studio” here and “Studio TeneX” there, if the number changes format from one platform to the next, the cross-referencing degrades. So does the prospect’s trust.

The rule fits in one sentence: the same name, one way of writing the address, one number, copy-pasted everywhere. List your online presences once, fix everything, and keep the list for future account creations.

4. Write the description with your clients’ words.

You have 750 characters. They fill up fast with jargon, and jargon matches no real search. Write what you do, for whom, where, in the words a client would use on the phone. The queries you target must appear naturally: website design in Nantes gets searched, global digital support does not.

Read the description out loud. If a client could not say a sentence, cut it.

5. Publish real photos, and keep publishing.

Your premises, your team, your work, your product in use. Taken on a phone if needed: a real average photo beats a perfect stock image. Generic visuals get spotted at first glance, often without the visitor being able to name why. We listed the signs that give away a generated visual, and they apply to a Google profile as much as to a website.

Frequency matters as much as quality. A profile whose last photo is three years old tells the story of a business at a standstill; one photo a month tells the opposite.

6. Fill in your services and attributes.

The products and services sections display your catalog directly in the profile, with prices if you want. Attributes (wheelchair access, contactless payment, by appointment) answer practical questions before they are asked. These sections are underused, so filling them sets you apart at little cost.

Add your social profiles too. The listing can show your LinkedIn, Instagram or YouTube links: proof of activity, one click away.

7. Open a direct contact channel, and hold it.

Booking button, messaging, Q&A: each open channel removes one friction between the prospect and you. But an open channel is a commitment. A public question left unanswered for four months is visible, and it reads as a broken promise.

Only open what you can hold within 24 hours. One responsive channel beats three silent ones.

8. Ask for reviews, reply to all of them.

Reviews are the section the prospect actually reads. Two moves, systematic:

1. Ask for a review after each delivered project, while the result is fresh.
2. Reply to every review received, good ones included.

The prospect reading your replies is judging how you treat your clients. A composed reply to a negative review reassures more than a page of silent five stars.

Never write the review in the client’s place, and buy none. A real quote, with a real name and a real company, does the work no arranged text will.

9. Publish posts to show the profile is alive.

An offer, an event, a delivered project, a published article. Google posts appear directly in the profile and signal an active business, to Google and to the visitor. The pace does not need to be intense: one post a month keeps the profile alive, zero posts a year lets it die.

Recycle what you already produce. A LinkedIn post rewrites into a Google post in five minutes.

10. Link the profile to a page that converts.

The click on “Website” is the moment the profile has done its job and your site starts its own. If that click lands on a page that is slow, or silent about what you sell, everything before it is lost. The prospect was warm, the page cooled them off.

The landing page must carry the profile’s identity, same name, same promise, and offer one action, only one: book a slot or request a quote. Same principle as a hero section: the visitor arrives with an intent, the page confirms it or breaks it within seconds.

How Google ranks profiles.

Google documents three criteria for the order of local results:

Prominence is built on both sides: reviews on the profile, and a well-made site behind it, with schema.org structured data, pages that answer your clients’ searches and load times kept in check. The profile and the site each strengthen the other’s ranking.

What AI answers change.

A growing share of searches no longer goes through the results page. It goes through GEO: being recommended by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI answers. Those answers are built on public sources: your profile, your reviews, your site, mentions of your business elsewhere. A complete profile consistent with the site feeds those answers; an empty profile leaves you out of them.

This is work that starts at the site’s design stage, not after. Julien Tessier, founder of Padel Day, after his site was delivered: “He also planned search and GEO from day one, ready to be found on Google and recommended by AI.”

The profile brings the click. The site signs the client.

An optimized profile does exactly one thing: bring an already interested prospect to your door. What happens next depends on the page behind it. If you have a launch or a trade show ahead and that page is not up to it, now is the time to rebuild it. Here is what every site we ship includes.

And if you want us to look at the consistency between your profile and your site together, book a call, thirty minutes to frame your project.