There is one hour of work available to every business in South East Queensland that costs nothing, requires no technical skill, and will almost certainly do more for your phone volume than the next thousand dollars you spend on advertising.
When we run a pre-audit before a website build, the Google Business Profile is usually the first thing we look at, because it’s the fastest way to tell whether a business has been actively managed or quietly neglected. The pattern is depressingly consistent: claimed in 2019, three photos, one category, hours that haven’t been touched since, and a description written by whoever set it up in a hurry.
Meanwhile the competitor two suburbs over is sitting in the top three of the map pack taking the calls.
When someone searches “concreter Caboolture” or “sourdough near me” or “physio Caloundra”, Google doesn’t hand them a list of websites first. It gives them a map with three businesses on it. That block is the Local Pack, and it sits above the organic results. For a service business, that placement is worth more than ranking first organically, because it comes with a phone number, a review score, directions and an open-or-closed status attached.
That Local Pack is powered entirely by Google Business Profile. Not by your website. Not by your Facebook page. By a free listing you probably claimed once and forgot.
Two shifts have made this more urgent. The first is AI Overviews now appearing on roughly half of tracked queries, which pushes traditional organic results further down the page and makes the map pack proportionally more valuable real estate. The second is that Google has visibly shifted how it weights local rankings and the industry consensus through 2026 is that active engagement signals now count for more relative to long-established authority. A newer business that is actually maintaining its profile can now outrank an older business that has gone quiet. That cuts both ways, and which way it cuts for you depends entirely on the next hour.
A note on the statistics you’ll see quoted elsewhere. Search for local SEO stats and you’ll be buried in claims like “78% of local mobile searches result in a visit within 24 hours.” That figure traces back to a Google study from over a decade ago and gets recycled endlessly with the year swapped out. We’re not going to pad this article with it. What we will say is that BrightLocal’s profile data consistently shows the majority of Google Business Profile views come through Search rather than Maps, averaging around 943 views on Search against 317 on Maps. Your listing is doing most of its work inside ordinary Google searches, not inside the Maps app. Optimise accordingly.
Set a timer. Have your phone and a laptop open. Log in at google.com/business.
More businesses than you’d think are working on a profile they don’t control, or have a duplicate listing competing with the real one.
Search your business name in Google. If you see the listing but no “Own this business?” prompt and no management options, someone else has it… often a former web developer, a marketing agency you parted ways with, or a family member who set it up. Request ownership through Google’s process now, because it takes days, not minutes, and everything else depends on it.
While you’re here, search your business name plus your suburb and look for duplicates. Old listings from a previous address or a slightly different business name will split your reviews and confuse Google about which one is real. Report duplicates for removal.
Your primary category is the single most influential thing you control on the profile. Not “the closest one”, the exact one. “Concrete contractor” and “Paving contractor” and “Driveway supplier” are separate categories that surface for different searches.
Pick the one that describes what you actually make most of your money from, then add secondary categories for genuine service lines. Don’t stack ten categories hoping to catch everything; irrelevant categories dilute relevance and can look like manipulation.
The description gets 750 characters. Write it for a human who is deciding between you and two competitors, not for a keyword algorithm. Name your service areas as actual suburbs. Say how long you’ve been operating. Say what you don’t do, if it saves everyone time. Avoid the “we pride ourselves on quality workmanship” filler as every competitor has written the same sentence and it persuades nobody.
This section is almost universally left empty, and it is one of the clearest signals of an actively managed profile.
List every service as its own entry with its own short description. A concreter should have driveways, patios, pool surrounds, shed slabs, decorative and repairs listed separately, not one entry that says “concreting”. A café should list its actual offerings. These entries are searchable and they give Google specific vocabulary to match against specific queries.
Fill in the attributes as well – wheelchair access, payment methods, whether you’re family-owned, whether you offer free quotes. These now feed into filtered searches and increasingly into AI-generated answers about local businesses.
This is where the neglect shows most visibly. A profile with four photos from 2021 reads as a business that may not still be trading.
Upload from your phone, not from a stock library. Google can read image metadata, and photos taken on location carry signals that stock images don’t. You want your exterior and signage, your team, your vehicles or premises, and (most importantly) your actual finished work. For a trades business, a dozen genuine job photos will outperform anything a designer produces.
One practical note: photos are now sorted with the most recent first on many profiles, which means your newest upload is what people see. Make it a good one.
Standard hours take two minutes. The part that matters is special hours.
Queensland has public holidays that catch businesses out every year; the Ekka People’s Day holiday in Brisbane in August, Labour Day in May, and the Christmas–New Year run where half of SEQ operates on reduced hours for three weeks. If your profile says you’re open and you’re not, you get a one-star review from someone who drove across town. If it says you’re closed and you’re open, you lose the sale entirely.
Set the special hours for the next twelve months now, in one sitting. It’s the single highest-value ten minutes in this entire list and it takes less effort than answering the complaint email afterwards.
Publish a Google Post. It can be a recent job, a seasonal note, an offer, a new service. It doesn’t need to be polished. The point is that posting is an activity signal, and profiles that show ongoing owner activity hold their visibility better than ones that go quiet. Multiple independent local SEO sources through 2026 report visibility softening on profiles inactive for roughly a month or more. Google has never published a hard threshold, so treat this as a pattern rather than a rule but the pattern is consistent enough to act on.
Then ask one recent, genuinely happy customer for a review. One. Not a batch email to your whole list.
Which brings us to the thing that changed this year.
Google updated its Business Profile review policy across two consecutive days in April 2026. It deployed Gemini-powered enforcement and pre-publication scam detection on the 16th, then on the 17th explicitly prohibited two practices that were extremely common: setting staff quotas for review collection, and asking customers to name a specific employee in their review.
If you’ve been running a “leave a review mentioning your technician” campaign, or if your team has a monthly review target on a whiteboard, stop. Enforcement is automated and it is not gentle; Google’s own 2025 Trust and Safety reporting put the number of policy-violating reviews blocked or removed at 292 million.
The safe version is still very effective: ask individually, ask soon after the work is done, ask without incentive, and ask everyone rather than filtering for the ones you think will be positive. Then reply to every review you get, including the bad ones, in a tone you’d be comfortable having read aloud in court.
The Questions and Answers section has been retired, with the API discontinued in late 2025 and the feature disappearing from listings through 2026. Google is replacing it with AI-generated answers drawn from other sources.
If you were one of the people seeding your own profile with helpful questions, that lever no longer exists. The answers Google gives about your business now come from your website, your services list, your description and your reviews. Which means the FAQ content that used to live on your profile needs to live on your website instead, written clearly enough for a machine to extract.
Google’s native Chat feature has been phased out and businesses can now attach WhatsApp as a direct contact option. Whether that’s useful depends on your customers, but if you were relying on Google Chat for enquiries, that pipe has closed and you should check where those messages are going now.
You may have seen posts claiming Google killed postcard verification on 3 July 2026 and made video verification mandatory for everyone, with suspension as the penalty. This has been repeated across a lot of marketing blogs.
It’s overstated. Google’s documentation still lists multiple verification methods (video recording, phone or SMS, email, live video call, and postcard) and Google decides which one you’re offered based on your category, address and history. What is true is that video verification has become the default path for most new and re-verified profiles, and postcard is now the exception rather than the norm. That’s a meaningful shift, but it is not a deadline and it is not “verify or vanish”.
If you are asked for video: it needs to be one continuous unedited take on your phone, showing three things; that you’re at the address, that the business genuinely operates, and that you’re authorised to manage it. Service-area businesses without a shopfront can use branded vehicles, tools, equipment and paperwork. Review takes a few business days.
Once the hour is done, the maintenance is genuinely small:
Add two or three photos from recent work. Publish one post. Reply to any new reviews. Check your hours against the month ahead. Glance at your insights to see what search terms are actually bringing people to you, because it is frequently not what you assumed.
That’s it. Ten minutes, monthly, in your calendar as a recurring task.
It can’t fix a website that loads in six seconds. It can’t rescue a business whose contact form has been silently failing for eight months. It can’t compensate for a phone number that isn’t tappable on mobile.
The profile gets people to your door. What happens next is your website’s job and if that part is broken, an optimised profile just means more people discovering the problem faster.
That’s the honest version. Google Business Profile is the highest-return free hour available to a local business, and it is genuinely a prerequisite rather than a nice-to-have. But it sits inside a system, and the system only works when the pieces connect.
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