Google Business Profile & Reviews

Proximity to the searcher, relevance and prominence. You cannot change where you are, so the work is in categories and services, review volume and recency, photos, posts and citation consistency.

For a service-area business without a storefront, proximity works differently and the other factors carry proportionally more weight — which is good news, because those are the ones you can influence.

More than the competitors showing above you in the map pack, and recent. A profile with 40 reviews where the newest is two years old reads worse than one with 15 from this quarter.

No. Never. It violates Google’s policies, it gets profiles suspended, and it is dishonest.

What we do is make asking systematic, so real customers who were happy are actually prompted at the right moment instead of being forgotten.

Respond to it, publicly, calmly and specifically — and then keep collecting good ones so it is not the newest thing anyone sees.

We write a response to every review, good or bad, as part of the programme. A well-handled one-star reply frequently reads better to a prospect than the review reads badly.

They are photos uploaded to your profile with location and keyword data attached, posted on a schedule rather than in one dump.

They are not a magic ranking lever. They are a freshness and relevance signal, and profiles that are actively maintained do measurably better than profiles that are set up once and abandoned.

Listings of your business name, address and phone number on other sites. What matters is that they match each other exactly.

Inconsistent citations — an old address here, a disconnected number there — actively confuse Google about which entity you are. Cleaning them up is unglamorous and it works.