Your Work Got Better. Your Google Profile Didn’t.

When I'm getting ready to talk with a local business owner, I usually look the business up on Google first, and I keep running into the same thing. The work has clearly gotten better over the years, and the Google profile looks like it was set up once and then left alone. If that sounds familiar, the most useful thing you can do for the business this month might be to update your Google Business Profile. (Recently I went looking for one and couldn't find a profile at all, which is its own kind of problem.)

That profile is doing a lot more work than most owners give it credit for. For plenty of customers it's the first thing they see, before the website and before the phone call. They search for help, a handful of businesses show up on the map, and they decide who looks trustworthy in about the time it takes to scroll.

What a stranger actually sees

They see the hours, and sometimes those hours are from two years ago. They see the photos, and sometimes it's a logo and one blurry shot of the outside of the building. They see the list of services, and the thing they need isn't on it. They see a review count that's a small fraction of the jobs the business has actually done, and a few of those reviews are sitting there with no reply.

None of that says the work is bad. It just says nobody's been minding the profile, and the truth is a stranger can't tell the difference between those two things. They don't know you, they don't know your crew, and they don't know the customer who's been calling you for ten years. All they have is what's on the screen.

Why this matters more than it used to

People don't only search Google anymore. More and more of them open ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude and ask who they should call, and those tools lean heavily on what's already out there about a business, especially the Google reviews and the details on the profile. A thin profile gives them very little to say about you. A current one with real reviews gives them a reason to put your name in the answer.

I find that genuinely interesting, and a little uncomfortable, because it means the profile somebody set up years ago is now answering questions about your business without you in the room.

How to update your Google Business Profile this week

This part is very fixable, and it isn't a new website, a rebrand, or a budget problem. Most of it is an afternoon.

Start by searching your own business name on your phone, the way a customer would, and look at it like you've never heard of yourself. Check the hours, including the holidays coming up. Call the number on the profile and make sure it rings somewhere a person will actually pick up. Read the services list and make sure it matches the work you want more of, not just the work you were doing when the profile went up. Add a few recent photos of real jobs and the real people who do them, and take down anything that doesn't look like your business today.

Then look at the reviews, especially the ones with no reply. A short, calm reply from the owner tells the next person reading exactly how you treat people, and that's true for a glowing review and a rough one. Silence reads like nobody's paying attention.

New reviews come from asking, and Google's own guidelines say to ask every customer, not just the ones you're sure were happy. That's a habit more than a task, and it's worth its own conversation another time. For now, just get the profile caught up to where the business already is.

What it costs to leave it

The hard part about an out-of-date profile is that it never tells you what it's costing. Nobody calls to tell you they picked someone else because your hours looked wrong. They just call the next name on the map, and you never find out they were looking.

Business Owners, search your own business on Google tonight and look at it like a stranger would. Does it look as good as the work you actually do?