How do I add a manager to my Google Business Profile?
Short answer
An owner of the profile opens its settings for people and access, invites the person by the email address of their Google account, and selects the manager role. The person then accepts the invitation. Menu names change, so follow Google's current steps. Give access by invitation, never by sharing the owner's password.
To add a manager to your Google Business Profile, an owner of the profile invites the person by the email address of their Google account and chooses the manager role. The person accepts the invitation and can then work on the profile from their own login. Only an owner can do this. If you can’t find the option, the account you’re signed in to is probably a manager itself, or isn’t on the profile at all.
The steps in general terms
The route is short, and the wording on screen changes from time to time. As Google has laid it out:
- Sign in to the Google account that owns the profile.
- Open the profile for editing, which Google now does from Search and Maps.
- Go to the profile’s settings and find the section for people and access.
- Add a person by entering the email address of their Google account.
- Choose the role, manager in this case, and send the invitation.
- The person accepts, and they then appear in the list.
If what you see doesn’t match, use Google’s current Business Profile help page on adding and removing owners and managers. Don’t follow an old video.
Owner or manager
Give the manager role to anyone who needs to work on the profile and doesn’t need to control it. Google’s roles have been set up along these lines, and the details are worth checking against its current description:
| Role | What it is for | Who should hold it |
|---|---|---|
| Primary owner | Full control, including who else has access. There’s one. | The business, in an account the owner controls |
| Owner | Much the same control as the primary owner, including adding and removing people | A second trusted person inside the company, as a backup |
| Manager | Day to day work: editing details, posting, replying to reviews. Can’t change who has access or remove the profile. | Office staff, and any outside agency or consultant |
That last row also settles what to give an outside company: an SEO company needs manager access and no more. If an agency asks to be made the owner, ask why. I work as a manager on a client’s profile. Before you hand over anything else, check the request against what access an SEO company needs.
Whoever has the password has the whole Google account, which may include company email, documents and billing. They can remove you from your own profile. You can’t see which changes were theirs, and when they leave, the only way to cut them off is to change the password for everyone. An invitation avoids all of that. Each person signs in as themselves and can be removed without affecting anyone else.
Removing a manager
An owner does this from the same access screen used for adding people. Do it the day someone stops needing access: an employee who leaves, an agency you have stopped using, a contractor whose project is finished. Old access is one of the usual ways a profile ends up in the wrong hands, and getting a profile back from someone else who owns it is much slower.
A sensible setup for a home-service company
Keep the list short and know every name on it. For a hypothetical HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) company in Oceanside with fifteen employees, that might be the company account as primary owner, the owner’s own account as a second owner, the office manager as a manager, and one outside consultant as a manager. Look at the list twice a year. When I start work on a Google Business Profile, the access list is one of the first things I check, because a name nobody recognizes needs explaining before anything else is changed.