There's no real secret to a Google Business Profile that ranks. There's a set of fields, and the boring truth that almost nobody fills all of them in properly. We audit profiles most weeks, and the gap between a listing stuck on page two and one sitting in the three-pack usually isn't clever strategy. It's six or seven fields left half-finished. Here is every setting that actually moves your ranking, what to put in it, and the mistakes we keep seeing.
Business name
Use your real name, exactly as it appears on your sign and your paperwork, and resist the urge to bolt keywords onto it. Would "Joe's Pizza" technically rank better as "Joe's Pizza | Best Italian Restaurant & Pasta Downtown"? Maybe, for a while. It would also get you suspended. Google started enforcing this hard around 2024, competitors report stuffed names in about ten seconds, and the penalty isn't a warning. It's a suspension that can take weeks to lift. If your real name happens to contain a keyword, lucky you. If it doesn't, leave it alone and win elsewhere.
Primary category
This is the one field worth obsessing over, because it does more for your ranking than anything else on the profile. Pick the highest-volume term that matches your core business, not the one that feels most precise. If pizza is most of your revenue, "Pizza restaurant" beats "Italian restaurant," even if you also do pasta. When you're genuinely split down the middle, lean toward the term more people actually search. You can check that in seconds: the busier category is almost always the one your three-pack competitors have chosen.
Additional categories
Google lets you add up to nine, and most businesses stop at one or two. The listings beating you usually carry five to seven. Each category is another query you can show up for, so this is some of the easiest ground you'll ever make up. The only rule: every category has to map to a service you really offer. Adding "Roofing contractor" when you don't touch roofs doesn't broaden your reach, it muddies your relevance and risks an edit or a suspension. Real services only.
Description (up to 750 characters)
The first 150 to 250 characters are the ones that matter, because that's what shows before someone clicks "more." Open with what you do, where you do it, and why someone should pick you, in plain language. Work your main term in once near the front and a couple of natural variations through the rest. Mention your city and a neighbourhood or two. Close with a gentle nudge to call or book.
What to keep out: links (they get stripped), phone numbers (there's a field for that), HTML, blocks of capital letters, and empty superlatives like "best in the world." Write it the way you'd describe the business to a neighbour, not the way you'd write an ad.
Services
Every service you list is another phrase you can be found for, so this is worth half an hour. Aim for fifteen to twenty-five, named the way customers search rather than the way your industry talks. "Drain unblocking," not "hydro-jet lateral clearance." Give each one a sentence or two of plain description with a natural long-tail phrase in it. Most profiles leave these descriptions blank, which is exactly why filling them in pulls you ahead.
Attributes
These are the little checkboxes, wheelchair accessible, free Wi-Fi, accepts cards, women-owned, and so on. They feel trivial, but they quietly match "near me + feature" searches that your competitors are ignoring. Tick every one that's honestly true. It takes five minutes and opens up a slice of traffic nobody's fighting over.
Photos
Profiles with a healthy library of photos tend to get more engagement, and engagement feeds back into how often you show up. Don't overthink the production values. A steady mix of exterior, interior, team, and real "at work" shots beats a handful of polished stock images. Add a few every couple of weeks rather than dumping fifty at once, since a trickle of fresh photos reads as an active business.
Questions & answers
You're allowed to ask and answer your own questions, so use it. Seed the eight things customers ask you most: pricing, hours, parking, payment, whether you cover their area. Answer each one in a couple of plain sentences, the way you'd reply on the phone, and let the natural keyword fall where it does. Left empty, this section fills up with random questions and the occasional unhelpful answer from a stranger. Get there first.
Posts
Post once a week and don't agonise over it. Rotate between an offer, an event, a quick update, and a product. Each post has roughly a week in the sun before it fades, so consistency beats brilliance here. A short post with a clear button every Tuesday will do more than a beautiful one you write once a quarter.
Where to start
If all of that feels like a lot, do it in this order: fix the primary category, add real secondary categories, then fill in services and the description. Those four account for most of the movement. Everything after that is compounding interest, the slow, steady kind that quietly lifts you past competitors who set their profile up once in 2019 and never touched it again.