Google Business Profile optimization for San Diego companies.

Google Business Profile optimization means making your free Google listing accurate, complete and correctly categorized, so that Google knows which searches to show it for. The profile is a set of fields. Some affect where you appear and some affect whether a customer calls. A few can get the listing suspended if they are filled in wrongly.

Which fields do which job

Broadly, some fields tell Google what you do and the others help a customer choose you. I keep those two effects, position and calls, apart when I report. An edit that adds calls without moving your position is still worth keeping, and you should know which kind it was.

Categories and services

A company that does mostly AC repair and is listed first as a general contractor is competing in the wrong searches. That’s why the primary category is the first field I check: it tells Google what kind of business it’s looking at. You get one primary category and a limited number of additional ones, with a list of services under them. I choose categories and services selectively, leaving out the ones that only sound related.

Service area, address and extra locations

Adding Carlsbad or San Marcos to your service area tells Google where you work. On its own, that setting won’t put you in the map pack there: in practice your position stays tied closely to the address the profile was verified at. The setting itself follows Google’s guidelines, which say a business that travels to its customers and doesn’t serve them at its own address should hide the address and list the areas it serves. I handle that as part of service area setup, and reaching the distant cities is the job of local SEO.

A company with more than one real, staffed location can have a profile for each. Each needs its own phone number and landing page, and its own reviews. Trouble starts when two profiles overlap or one sits at an address that doesn’t qualify. I set up multi-location profiles so they don’t compete with each other.

Photos, posts and customer questions

A homeowner is deciding who to let into the house, so I use real photos of your crew and trucks, and of finished jobs, in place of stock images. Posts put a current offer or a recent job on the listing. Both posts and photos mostly affect whether someone who has found you decides to call, and so do answers to customer questions. Google has changed how customer questions appear on profiles more than once, so with questions and answers I start from how the feature works at present and what is worth your time.

Suspensions and what causes them

For a company that lives on map calls, a suspension is an emergency: it can take the listing out of Maps and the map pack until Google reinstates it.

Common causes are keywords added to the business name and an address that doesn’t qualify (a virtual office or a mailbox). Duplicate listings are another, and sometimes a legitimate business is suspended after an ordinary edit. Suspension recovery starts with the appeal and the evidence Google asks for. Google decides whether a listing comes back and how long that takes, so I can’t promise a reinstatement or a date. My part is making sure the appeal is complete and that the profile follows the guidelines when it comes back.

The audit, and who owns the profile

The profile should belong to your company, and anyone who works on it, me included, should be a manager you can remove. A previous agency still holding access is a common exception. If someone else is the primary owner of your listing, they can edit it or remove you from it, so I deal with that first.

The access check is part of the profile audit I run before changing anything, which also compares every field with Google’s guidelines and with the profiles that outrank you.