Google Business Profile setup for an Erode business

Before you start

Sign in with a Google account the business controls — not a staff member’s personal account and not your web designer’s. Whoever owns the profile controls it, and recovering a profile from someone who has left is slow. Add other people as managers later instead of sharing one password.

Search Google Maps for your business first. If a listing already exists, claim it rather than creating a second one: duplicate profiles split your reviews and can both be suspended.

Business name

Use the name on your signboard, bills and registration — exactly that. Adding keywords such as “Best Website Designer Erode” to the name breaks Google’s guidelines and is one of the most common reasons profiles are suspended. The town and the service belong in the category, the description and your website, not in the name.

Primary category

The primary category does more for which searches you appear in than any other field. Choose the one that describes what you are, not everything you do: a clinic is not a pharmacy because it dispenses medicine. Add secondary categories only for services you genuinely offer as a main line of business. If the right category is not in the list, pick the closest real one rather than inventing a description in its place.

Address or service area

This is the decision that matters most, and there are only two honest answers.

• Customers come to you — a shop, clinic or showroom. Show the address, and make sure the map pin sits on your actual entrance.
• You go to customers — a contractor, a service engineer, a studio like ours with no public premises. Hide the address and set service areas instead: the towns or districts you really serve.

Do not use a virtual office, a relative’s shop or a co-working address you do not staff. Google verifies addresses, and a profile built on one it cannot verify is at risk however well the rest is done. A service-area profile will rarely appear in the map results for businesses with a pin in the town centre; that is the trade-off for not publishing an address.

Phone, website and hours

Use a number that is answered during the hours you publish, and the same number that appears on your website and bills. Link the website’s home page, or the page for that branch if you have more than one.

Set regular hours, and set special hours before festivals and holidays. A customer who arrives at a closed shop because the profile said it was open tends to leave a review about it.

Description, services and products

The description has room for a few short paragraphs. Say what you do, for whom, and where, in the words a customer would use — in plain English, or Tamil if that is how your customers search. Do not paste in a list of keywords or links; the description is read by people.

Add your main services and, if you sell products, the items people ask about most. Keep the names the same as on your website.

Photos

Real photographs of the entrance, the inside, your team at work and the things you make or sell. For a service-area business, photographs of work on site and of the team are what establish that you exist. Avoid stock images; they add nothing and can be removed.

Verification

Google decides which verification methods a profile is offered, and they change: a video of your premises and signage, a phone or email code, or occasionally a postcard. Keep your signage, your business documents and the address or service area consistent before you start, because a failed verification is slower to recover from than a careful first attempt.

Reviews

Ask every customer, at the point the job is done — a WhatsApp message with the review link, sent after handover, works for most local businesses. Do not offer discounts or gifts for reviews, and do not ask only the customers you expect to be happy; both break Google’s review policies.

Reply to every review, including the bad ones. A calm, specific reply to a complaint is read by the next customer more carefully than the complaint itself.

After setup

A profile is not finished at verification. Add photographs as work happens, post updates when something genuinely changes, check the hours before every holiday, and look at the profile’s performance report monthly to see which searches it appears for. If your name, phone or address change, update the profile, the website and your directory listings on the same day, so every source says the same thing.

If you would like this done with you, profile setup is part of our local SEO service. The profile stays in your name either way.