Your profile is doing more work than your website.

Nothing, it’s the same product renamed. Google called it Google Places, then Google My Business (GMB), and since 2021 it’s been Google Business Profile. Plenty of people still say GMB, and some just call it their Google Maps listing.

Usually one of four things: it was never verified, it’s been suspended, it’s a duplicate competing with another listing for the same business, or it is showing but only within a very small radius so you never see it yourself. The audit tells us which one it is quickly.

The most common cause by far is the primary category being too broad or simply wrong. After that: services not listed individually, no recent activity, thin or old reviews, or details that don’t match what’s on your website and in directories. Google looks at relevance, distance and prominence. Most struggling profiles are weak on relevance, and that’s the easiest of the three to fix.

Yes, and if money’s tight you should. Claim it, verify it, get the category right, list every service, add real photos and ask customers for reviews consistently, that alone puts you ahead of most local competitors. Where it gets harder is knowing which category actually ranks in your area, keeping activity going every month, and diagnosing things when they go wrong.

Anyone with either a location customers can visit, or a service area they travel to. Online-only businesses aren’t eligible. Neither are PO boxes, virtual offices, or rented mailboxes, and using one risks suspension. If you work from home you can run a service-area profile with the address hidden, which is what most trades and removals firms do.

Often, yes, but the appeal needs doing carefully, and rushing it makes things worse. Suspensions usually come from an address issue, a business name that includes keywords it shouldn’t, or a sudden burst of reviews that looked artificial. Get in touch before you submit anything and we’ll tell you what we think happened.

There’s no threshold. Consistency and recency matter more than volume: a steady trickle of genuine recent reviews outperforms a big batch collected years ago. What matters more practically is how you compare to the two or three competitors sitting next to you in the map pack.

On its own, not dramatically. As part of a maintained profile, yes. Activity is one of the signals that separates a live business from a dormant listing, and posts give someone comparing three profiles a reason to pick yours. Nobody should be paying a lot of money purely for posts.

Yes. Google reads your website to work out what you’re relevant for, so a strong profile with a weak site behind it caps out fast, and for anything above a small job, people check the website before they commit. The two work together.

No. There’s no setting for it. If you’re dealing with a review problem, the answer is responding well and building enough genuine recent reviews that one bad experience isn’t the first thing people read.

Each one needs its own verified profile, its own reviews and ideally its own page on your website. What doesn’t work is one listing covering several branches, or duplicate profiles at the same address. Both cause ranking problems, and duplicates can trigger suspensions.

Profile changes can show within days, and it’s common to see views and calls move within the first few weeks. GBP work is usually the fastest-moving part of any local campaign. Competitive positions in busy areas take longer, since reviews and prominence build over months.