What is a Google Business Profile?
A Google Business Profile is the free listing that decides how your business appears in Google Search and Google Maps — the name, address, opening hours, phone number, photos and reviews shown in the panel beside the ordinary search results. You claim it and manage it yourself, through Google.
Why it matters to a shop
For most local businesses that panel, not the website, is the first thing a customer sees — they search on a phone, tap the map result, and decide from what is shown there. If nobody has claimed the profile, what appears is whatever Google inferred or a stranger suggested as an edit. Wrong opening hours means someone drives over on a day you are closed, and the review they leave about it stays there. The panel also carries the link to your site, so an unclaimed profile is a shopfront pointing nowhere.
How to claim one and set it up
- Search your own business name plus your district on a phone. If a panel appears offering to claim or manage the listing, it already exists and is not yours yet — claim that one. Do not create a second listing: duplicates get merged or suspended and your reviews end up split across both. Google verifies ownership by postcard, phone call, or a short video.
- Fill the three fields customers act on: exact opening hours including public holidays, a phone number somebody answers, and the website link. Point that link at the address your site actually publishes to, then tap it from the profile itself once and check it lands where you think it does.
- Add photos of the actual place: the shopfront as it looks from the street, the inside, and what you sell. Then treat hours as the field you revisit most — a temporary closure, a holiday, a change of shift. Everything else on the profile changes once a year; hours change monthly.
Common mistake: Setting it up once and calling it done, or treating it as a replacement for a website. The panel belongs to Google and shows what Google decides to show. Your own site is the only page where the wording, the photos and the order are yours to set.