There is a page representing your business that most of your potential customers will see, and it is probably not your website.
It is the box that appears on the right side of the search results, or at the top on a phone, with your name, your hours, your rating, a row of photos and a couple of buttons. Google calls it a Business Profile. Most people call it “the Google thing.” Plenty of business owners do not realize they control it at all.
For a local business, that panel usually gets far more attention than the website does, for a simple structural reason: it arrives first, it answers the immediate question, and a large number of people never need to click past it. They wanted your hours, or your phone number, or to see whether the reviews were decent. They got all three without leaving the search results.
Which means the thing you have never touched is doing more selling than the thing you paid for.
What people actually use it for
The panel is not a marketing surface in the way a website is. Nobody reads it for persuasion. They read it to resolve a specific question, usually one of about five:
Are you open right now? Where exactly are you? What is the phone number? Do people like you? What does the place look like?
That is close to the entire list. And notice how brutally practical it is. There is no room in there for your story, your values, or your years of experience. It is a utility. The businesses that do well with it treat it like a utility and make sure it answers those five questions perfectly.
The businesses that do badly with it are usually not doing anything wrong exactly. They just never finished. The profile got claimed at some point, a few fields got filled in, and then it sat.
The parts people leave blank
Here is what I find missing most often, roughly in order of how much it costs.
Hours, including holiday hours. An empty hours field is bad. Wrong hours are worse. If somebody drives to your shop on a Saturday because Google said you were open, you have not just lost a sale, you have produced an actively angry person who is now within one tap of writing a review about it. Holiday hours are the specific trap, because the default assumption is normal hours and almost nobody remembers to set the exception.
Photos that you chose. Every profile has photos. The question is whose. If you have never uploaded any, the images representing your business are whatever customers happened to take, which tends toward blurry phone shots of parking lots and the least flattering corner of the room. This is the single most fixable thing on the list and I am amazed how often it goes untouched. You can take better photos than that with the phone in your pocket, in twenty minutes, today.
The description. Short, plain, in your own words. Not keyword soup. It is read by humans deciding whether you sound like a real business.
Services or products. Most categories let you list what you actually do, individually. This is worth the half hour it takes because it lets you say “we do that” in the exact words a customer used, and because a blank one implies a business that has not thought about it.
Attributes. Wheelchair accessible, parking available, appointment required, whatever your category offers. These look trivial and they are not, because for the person who needs that specific thing, it is the entire decision.
The reviews part, honestly
Reviews are the piece of this that business owners find most stressful, and there is a lot of nonsense written about them, so let me be careful about what is actually known.
BrightLocal has run a survey of local consumer review behavior every year for over a decade. It is the most consistently useful public research on this, and it is worth reading yourself rather than trusting anyone’s summary of it, including mine.
Two findings from their 2025 edition that I think are genuinely useful. First, Google is by a wide margin the most used platform for finding reviews, cited by around 83 percent of consumers, ahead of everything else including Yelp and Facebook. Second, the share of people who say they never read reviews at all is very small, around 4 percent.
I want to flag something about the wider category of review statistics, because you will encounter a lot of them and many are unreliable. Figures like “93 percent of consumers read reviews before buying” get repeated endlessly with no clear source, and the actual survey numbers move around year to year and depend heavily on exactly how the question was worded. BrightLocal’s own data shows the “always” and “regularly” responses declining between their 2024 and 2025 surveys, which is not what you would guess from the way this topic is usually discussed.
So the honest summary is narrower than the usual pitch, and still enough to act on. Most people check. Most of them check on Google specifically. That is sufficient reason to take your Google reviews seriously without needing to inflate it.
What to do about reviews without being weird about it
Ask, at the right moment. The right moment is immediately after the thing went well and the customer said so out loud. Not a week later in a mass email. Right then, in person or in the follow up message, while they are still pleased.
Make it one tap. Google gives you a short link that opens the review form directly. Get that link, put it in a text message template, and stop sending people on a scavenger hunt through the app.
Respond to all of them. This is the part with the best return and the lowest effort. Respond to the good ones briefly and warmly. Respond to the bad ones without arguing.
On that second point: the reply to a negative review is not written for the person who left it. That relationship is usually already decided. It is written for the next twenty people who read it while deciding about you. Those readers are not checking whether you were right. They are checking whether you are the kind of business that gets defensive. A short, non defensive reply that offers to sort it out privately does more for you than winning the argument ever could.
Never buy them. Beyond the obvious platform risk, fake reviews read as fake to actual humans far more often than the people buying them believe. A profile with a handful of specific, slightly mixed, clearly real reviews is more persuasive than a wall of five star sentences that all sound like the same person wrote them, because that is exactly what happened.
The photo problem, specifically
I want to spend a moment on photos because it is the item where the gap between effort and payoff is widest.
The photos on a Google profile are the only visual evidence most people will ever see. They are looking at them to answer a question that they would never say out loud: does this place look like somewhere I want to go, or send my money to?
You do not need a photographer. You need daylight and a few minutes. Shoot near a window or outside, in the morning or late afternoon rather than midday. Clean the frame of clutter first, because the camera notices mess that your eye has stopped seeing. Take far more than you need and delete most of them.
Cover the obvious set: the outside of the building including whatever a person would use to recognize it from the road, the inside, the work itself, and the people who do it. That last one matters more than owners expect. A face makes a business feel real in a way that no amount of interior photography does.
Then update them occasionally. Not constantly. A profile whose photos are visibly a decade old is telling on itself.
An afternoon, once, then a few minutes a month
The reason I lead with this topic when someone asks where to start is that the effort curve is unusual. Almost everything else in marketing needs sustained work to matter. This one is mostly a single sitting.
Fill in every field. Every one, including the ones that seem pointless. Take and upload twenty decent photos. Write the description. List the services. Set the hours and set the holiday exceptions. Get your review link and save it somewhere you will find it.
Then the ongoing job is small: respond to reviews as they come in, fix the hours before holidays, add a few new photos when something changes.
That is not a marketing strategy. It is closer to unlocking the front door before opening. But it is the highest return afternoon available to most local businesses, it costs nothing, and an enormous number of businesses have simply never done it.
Go and look at yours. Not the version you remember setting up. The version a stranger sees right now, in a private browsing window, next to your two closest competitors.
That comparison is the whole assignment.
Review behavior figures cited from BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2025. Where this site uses numbers, they are either measured with free public tools or attributed to a named source. Estimates are always labeled as estimates.