This is the piece of advice we give away most often, because it's the one that costs a local business the least and returns the most. It's free, it takes an afternoon to set up properly, and most of your competitors have done a bad job of it.
Here's the whole thing, in the order we'd do it.
Start with the categories, not the description
When you create the profile at google.com/business, the first meaningful decision is your primary category. It is the highest-leverage field on the entire profile, because categories are a large part of what decides which searches you appear in at all.
Pick the primary category that describes what you actually are, not what you aspire to be. Then add secondary categories for the adjacent things you genuinely offer. A café that also does birthday bookings should say so. A marketing agency that also builds websites should list "website designer" as well.
Every extra category is another set of searches you can surface for. This is free and it takes two minutes, and it's the step people skip fastest.
Decide address versus service area, deliberately
If customers come to you — a café, a club, a clinic, a shop — publish the address. You want the pin.
If you go to customers, or you work from home and would rather not publish where you live, set up as a service-area business instead. You list the areas you serve and Google hides the street address.
The honest trade-off: service-area businesses tend to rank slightly weaker in Maps than businesses with a verified physical address, because Google has no pin to rank from. That's a real cost, and it's a genuine privacy-versus-visibility decision rather than a technicality. Make it on purpose.
Start verification early
Nothing on the profile shows publicly until you're verified. Google will offer verification by postcard, phone, or video — video is usually fastest, and you should expect to show your premises and equipment.
Begin this on day one, not after you've perfected the description. Everything else can be edited later; verification is the gate.
Write the description for the first 250 characters
You get 750 characters. Only the first 250 or so show before the "more" link, and most people never click it.
So front-load. Lead with what you do and where you do it. Save the founding story for later in the paragraph, or cut it entirely — it's your About page's job, not this field's.
A useful test: if someone read only the first two lines, would they know whether to call you? If not, rewrite.
List services separately, and add photos
Add each service as its own entry with its own description, rather than lumping them into one line. Every service you add is another query you can surface for.
Then photos — the most-ignored, highest-impact part of the whole profile. Upload your logo, a cover image, your space, your team at work, and examples of what you produce. Then keep adding a few every month: freshness is a ranking signal, and a profile with recent photos reads as an open, active business in a way a static one doesn't.
If you sell packages or products with prices, list them under Products. Most local competitors won't have, and a visible price is one less reason for someone to bounce.
The field almost nobody uses
Q&A. You can ask and answer your own questions on your own profile. This is entirely legitimate, and almost nobody does it.
Seed five or six from the questions you actually get asked — parking, opening hours on holidays, whether you take walk-ins, what a typical job costs. You're not gaming anything; you're pre-answering the objections that would otherwise become a phone call you don't have time for, or a customer who quietly goes elsewhere.
While you're there: Google Posts appear on the profile and expire after about seven days. One a week, repurposed from whatever you're already posting on Instagram, takes ten minutes and signals an active business.
Reviews are the part that decides it
Everything above affects whether you appear. Reviews largely decide whether you get picked once you do.
The advice worth taking seriously is what not to do. Don't review your own business. Don't have partners or family post reviews. Don't buy them. Google detects this, and the consequences run from having reviews removed to having the profile suspended — which undoes every hour you spent on the rest of it.
The legitimate routes are slower and they work:
- Ask at the point the customer is happiest, which is usually right after you've delivered something they're pleased with — not weeks later.
- Ask in person or over WhatsApp with a direct link. A generic "please review us" printed on a receipt converts close to nothing.
- Ask anyone you've done free or discounted work for. You gave them something; it's a fair ask.
And reply to every review, good and bad. A calm, specific reply to a critical review persuades more readers than a five-star one does — it shows a stranger exactly how you behave when something goes wrong, which is the thing they're actually trying to work out.
The one thing people get wrong
They set it up and never touch it again.
Google ranks active profiles above dormant ones. Fifteen minutes a month — one post, two photos, answer any new questions, reply to any reviews — will put you ahead of most businesses in your category in Pune, because most of them do nothing at all after the first week.
That's the whole advantage. It isn't clever and it isn't secret. It's just that consistency is boring, and boring is where the gap is.
If you'd rather someone else did it
Google Business Profile setup is part of the audit we run for every business we talk to, and you keep that audit whether or not you hire us. If you just want to know what's wrong with yours, ask for a teardown — we publish one a month, free, and there's no pitch attached.
Related: Why we don't run paid ads (yet) · Ask for a free teardown