Google Business Profile optimisation in Newcastle, NSW

It is the free listing Google keeps about your business, separate from your website. It is what appears in the map, and it is what a customer taps to call you or get directions.

The listing and the website are two separate things Google holds about your business. The website earns the ordinary blue results. The listing earns the map. A business can have a good website and still be missing from the map, because nothing on the website fixes an empty listing.

It is free to have and it takes an afternoon to fill in properly, which is why it is the first thing worth doing.

What lives on it

• Your name, address and phone number. Written exactly the same way as they are written everywhere else your business appears.
• Categories. One primary and up to nine more. This is the field that decides which searches you are eligible for at all.
• Services. Every job you do, listed by name. A separate field to categories and the one most listings leave empty.
• Photos, hours and the service area. Your own photographs, real hours including holidays, and the area you travel to if you have no shopfront.
• Reviews, posts and questions. The parts that keep moving after the setup is finished.

Your primary category tells Google what your business fundamentally is, and it is the strongest single field on the listing. The secondary ones open up searches you are otherwise invisible for.

Categories come from a fixed list Google maintains. You do not write your own, you pick from theirs, and the wording of theirs rarely matches the wording your customers use. That gap is where most of the work is.

A business with one broad category is eligible for a narrow slice of the searches it could win. Adding the genuine secondary ones is usually the single fastest change on a Newcastle listing, and it takes minutes.

How to choose them

• Primary is what you mainly are. Not what is most profitable, and not what you wish you were known for. The one a customer would use to describe you.
• Secondaries are what you genuinely also do. Every one you add has to be a service you really deliver. Adding categories you do not serve is a fast route to a suspension.
• Check what the businesses above you use. Their categories are visible, and the gap between theirs and yours is often the whole explanation.

Google's own guidance on categories is short and it is worth reading before you touch the field, because the primary category moves a listing further than any other setting on it.

Services is a separate field to categories, and it is where you name every job you do in your own words. It is one of the few fields where you are not picking from Google's list.

Categories say which type of business Google files you under. Services say what you actually do. Most Newcastle listings we open carry the first and leave the second empty, so Google is guessing at half the business.

The list is the part that counts. Google offers a description box under each service and it carries very little weight, so a sentence or two naming the service and the area is enough. The one hard rule is that a link never goes in one.

How to build the list

• Name every job. Not the categories again. The actual jobs, in the words a customer would use when they ring.
• Keep the descriptions short. A sentence or two. This field is not where positions are won and a long one is time spent for nothing.
• Never put a URL in a service description. It does not help, and it looks like what it is.

Almost all of it comes from the address and the name: an address that is not really yours, keywords stuffed into the business name, or a service area business showing a street address it should have hidden.

A suspension takes the listing off the map while it is appealed, and the appeal is slow. It is worth knowing what causes them before touching anything.

What causes them

• Keywords in the business name. The name field is for the name on your paperwork. Adding your service and your suburb to it is the most common cause and the easiest to avoid.
• An address that is not really yours. A mailbox, a co-working desk you do not staff, or a relative's house. Google verifies addresses and it does check.
• The wrong service area setting. If you travel to customers and have no shopfront, the street address is hidden and the area is set instead. Getting this backwards can remove you from the map entirely.
• Categories you do not serve. Added to catch more searches, and read as what it is.

The rules are published, in Google's guidelines for representing your business, and they are the document an appeal is judged against.

Fix the name and address first, then the categories, then the service list, then your own photographs, then the hours and the service area. Posts and questions come after all of it.

1. Make the name and address match your paperwork

The registered name, written the same way it appears on the Australian Business Register, with no service words and no suburb bolted on.

2. Set the primary category, then the secondaries

One primary that describes what you are. Then every secondary you genuinely deliver. This is the field that moves the most.

3. List every service by name

In your customers' words, with a short description each and no links.

4. Put your own photographs on it

Real jobs, real vehicles, real premises. Stock photography on a local listing is obvious to a customer and useless to Google.

5. Set the hours, the holidays and the service area

Including public holidays, because a listing that says open when you are shut collects a bad review from somebody who drove there.

6. Then keep it moving

Reviews every week, replies to all of them, the occasional post, and answers to the questions people leave. A listing that has not changed in a year looks like one.

The filling in is an afternoon. The categories can move a position quickly. Reviews and photographs are the slow half, and they are what keeps a position once you have it.

The order it happens in

• The listing is corrected and filled in. Name, address, categories, services, photos, hours. One sitting, and the categories are the part that can move a position on their own.
• The routine starts. Review requests going out after every job, replies to each one, photographs added as work is finished.
• The position settles. Strongest close to your address and weaker further out, which is distance working normally rather than something being wrong.

A listing is never finished, which is the difference between it and a website page. The businesses holding the top three in Newcastle are the ones still adding to theirs.

Ask whose Google account the listing sits in, what changes in the first week, whether they will touch the business name, and what they show you each month. The name question is the one that separates the careful from the reckless.

We do this work in Newcastle, so we are not neutral. These are the questions we would want asked of us.

• Whose account does the listing sit in? The business's own, with the owner as the owner and anyone else as a manager. Ours are set up that way from the start.
• Will you change my business name? Ours stays as it is registered. Anybody offering to add your service and suburb to it is offering you a suspension.
• What changes in the first week? Categories, services, photos and hours. If the first week is a report, the work has not started.
• What do you show me each month? Calls, direction requests and the searches people used, which the listing reports on its own.
• Am I locked in? Ours runs month to month and always has. Any arrangement you cannot leave at the end of a month is worth a second look.

This is also the most doable of everything we write about. An owner with an afternoon can do the whole setup, and plenty of Newcastle businesses have.