Quick Answer: For a local business, more buyers now make their decision on your Google Business Profile than ever reach your website. They see your name, rating, photos, hours and recent reviews in the search result and decide to call, visit or move on from there. That makes the profile your real homepage. Treat it like one: every field complete, categories and services exact, photos recent, hours including holidays correct, a new review arriving every few weeks and every review answered. None of this costs money. All of it costs attention, and most competitors are not paying it.
Why call it the homepage?
Because of where the decision happens. We wrote in September about the zero-click reality: a majority of searches end without a click to any website. For “plumber near me” or “physical therapy in Newtown,” what the buyer sees is the map with three businesses on it, each with a rating, a review count, hours and a photo.
They tap one. Often they call from that screen. The website, if they visit it at all, confirms a decision already made. So the profile is doing the job the homepage was built to do, and it deserves the same care.
What should you check first?
Accuracy. Search your business name and look at the profile as a stranger would. Is the name exactly your business name, with no keywords stuffed into it? Is the primary category the service that makes you the most money? Are the hours right, including the holiday hours Google will ask about?
Then the services list. Google lets you name the services you offer under each category. Fill it in with the words customers use, not the words your trade uses. A buyer searches for “leaking roof repair,” not “remediation.”
Why do photos matter so much?
Because the profile with recent, real photos looks like a business that is open and busy, and the one with a logo and a stock image looks like it might not be. Add photos of real work, real people and the real premises, and add them regularly rather than in one batch. The date on a photo is visible, and a profile whose newest photo is two years old says something you do not want it to say.
How many reviews do you need, and how recent?
Recency matters more than the total. A business with 40 reviews and the newest from last week beats one with 120 reviews and nothing since the summer, in the buyer’s eyes and increasingly in Google’s. The pattern to aim for is steady: a review every week or two, forever, rather than a burst of twenty after a campaign.
The way to get that is to ask after every completed job, by text, with the link, while the customer is still pleased. It works best when it is automatic, so nobody has to remember. That is a system, and it is one of the first we set up in reputation management.
Do you have to answer every review?
Yes. Every one, including the five-star ones with no text. A short, specific, human reply tells the next buyer that someone is home. For a critical review, the reply is written for the people who will read it later, not for the person who wrote it: calm, factual, offering to make it right offline.
An unanswered review is the profile equivalent of a phone that rings out.
What about posts, questions and messaging?
Profile posts are a small, steady signal that the business is active. One a week is plenty: a finished job, a seasonal reminder, an offer. The questions and answers section fills itself if you leave it alone, often with wrong answers, so seed it with the five questions you get asked most and answer them yourself. Messaging is worth switching on only if someone will answer within minutes; otherwise it does more harm than good.
How do you know it is working?
The profile’s own performance report shows calls, direction requests and website taps month by month. Watch those three, alongside the review count and the days since the last review. If the calls rise while your ad spend stays flat, the homepage is doing its job.
We go through all of this on the first visit with every client, because it is the highest return work in local marketing and it is almost always behind. If you want to see where yours stands, start by searching for your own business the way a customer would, then fix what you find in the order above.
How we do this for clients: SEO & local search