Your Google Profile Is Your Real Homepage
For a lot of the people looking for you, the listing is the homepage. Make the label match the drawer, and make it match everywhere.
A Saturday morning, a laptop, your phone and the logins.
The weekend version.
Set aside a Saturday morning, a laptop, your phone and a cup of coffee. You need the logins for anything you are going to fix, so find those first.
1Claim or verify the listing, or create it
Search your business name, signed out. If there is a listing you do not control, claim it. If you do control it, confirm it is verified and that you, not a former employee or a former provider, are an owner on it. Chapter 14 is about why that matters. If there is no listing at all, make one: go to the Google Business Profile manager, sign in with a Google account you own and will keep, enter the business exactly as it reads on your index card, and choose how to verify. Google decides the method, usually a short video of the premises or the truck, sometimes a phone code or a postcard, and the listing does not show until verification clears. Start it first thing, because the wait can be days, and do the rest of this list while you wait.
2Write the index card
Name, address, phone, hours, website, exactly as they should appear everywhere. This is your master copy.
3Check the category
It lives under Business information in the profile editor. Search your main trade and town in a private window. Open the top three map listings and note the category each one uses. Then choose the one that accurately describes your business. Add secondary categories only where they are true.
4List and describe your services
These live on the Services tab of the editor. Google offers a list of standard services for your category, and below it you can add custom ones in your own words. Add every service you actually provide, then go back to the same tab, click each service you added, and fill in its description and its price or price range. If the price depends on the job, choose the "From" option and enter your starting price. Give each its own short description in plain words: what it is, who it is for, what to expect. Put a price on everything you can stand behind, because AI answers increasingly pull pricing straight from the profile, and a listing with prices gets quoted where a listing without them gets skipped. Take off anything you do not do.
5Review what Google added on its own
Google sometimes fills in services, attributes and details from what it finds elsewhere. Read each one. Remove what is wrong.
6Add current photos
Real jobs, the real crew, and the building from the street so people can find the door. Recent beats polished. The photos are a label too, and not only for people. Google reads the pictures themselves and can tell a crew on a roof from a logo on a white background, so a gallery of real work tells it what the business is before anyone reads a word, and a gallery of handshakes and stock art tells it nothing. Name the files plainly before you upload them, roof-replacement-springfield rather than IMG_4471, for the same reason.
7Set your service areas
if you go to the customer. List the towns you actually serve, not the ones you wish you did.
8Reply to your reviews
, newest first. Short, specific, and in your own voice. One more reason to be specific: Google reads the words in the reviews and in your replies to decide what you do and where you do it. "Glad the gutter repair out in Springfield held through the storm" tells it two things that "Thanks!" does not. Same rule as the service descriptions, though: say it only when it is true of that job, and never stuff a reply with words a customer would not use.
9Run the Same Business Everywhere sweep
First, find the places you do not know about. In a private window, search your phone number by itself, then your old address if you have moved, then your business name and town, and add every site that comes up to the list. That is how the med spa’s 53 old addresses turned up. Then go down the list and fix each place you hold a login so it matches the index card. Write down the places you cannot log into. That list is the start of your handoff. For your own website, save the index card in Elevated Page Check and it will compare every page you open against it, including the number your tap-to-call links actually dial.
The good news: you do not have to spend hours scouring Google to find all these pages. Past a couple dozen directories you should not even try. There are two kinds of tool for this. A citation scanner, BrightLocal is one, takes your index card and checks it against the directories for you, then hands back a list of every place that disagrees, with the wrong value next to the right one. You still make the fixes, but you skip the searching. A listing network, Yext is the best known, goes a step further: you enter the card once and it pushes it out to the directories it partners with and holds them to it, so a change you make in one place reaches dozens. The choice is the same one this book keeps offering. Run the scanner yourself if you want the list and have the Saturdays. Pay a network if you would rather it be handled. Or hand the whole sweep to whoever already looks after your listing, including us, since the listings check is part of the free report described in Chapter 15. In every case, the index card stays the master copy, and the network account, if there is one, is in your name, which is Chapter 14’s whole argument.
Write the service descriptions in a plain document first, not straight into the listing. You can reuse them on your website, in your estimates and in your ads, and you will want them in one place the next time a platform asks what you do.
Save your index card under the gear as the business card, with the name, phone, street, town, state, ZIP and website exactly as they read on your Google profile. The Local tab then compares every page you open against it, and on Yelp, Facebook, the BBB and the other directory sites it opens on that tab by itself. Copy my NAP puts your exact details on the clipboard for a listing’s edit form.
- Local tabthe Same Business Everywhere sweep, step 9: each listing against your card, line by line.
- Images tabstep 6: photos with camera file names or no alt text.
The worksheets.
Fill it in on your phone. It saves on your device and prints clean.
Category, Services, Proof
Saves on this device as you go. Nothing is sent to us.
Open your listing signed out, in a private window, and check each line against what is actually true of your business.
Category
Services
Proof
Check it took
Same Business Everywhere
Saves on this device as you go. Nothing is sent to us.
Write the index card first, then make every place the business appears match it exactly.
The index card
Sweep run by: me / a scanner / a listing network / our provider
The places
Places I cannot log into
Check it took.
give it a few days, then search your trade and town on your phone, signed out, in a private window. Open your listing and read it as a stranger. Does the label match the drawer? Do the category, services, hours, phone and link all match the index card? Then search your phone number by itself and look at what comes up. Each result should describe the same business.
Where it stops being a weekend job.
Most of this chapter is typing. A few things are not, and they are the ones that look fine from the inside right up until a customer cannot find you.
Duplicate listings you cannot control. A suspension. A move stuck in re-verification. Services Google added that you do not offer, which come back after you delete them. A listing owned by a former provider who is not answering. In each case, filling out the form is not enough, because the form is not yours or Google has stopped trusting the one you have.
Someone who has filed a reinstatement or a merge with Google before and can tell you how the last one went. That can be an employee, a relative who manages listings, the provider you already pay, or us. For the places you could not log into, the fix is usually a listing network account in your name, run by you or by whoever handles your listing. Ask them to describe the last case they handled. This experience is specific: a person who builds good websites has not necessarily untangled a duplicate listing.
A search for your business that shows one verified profile with your reviews attached, not two half-profiles splitting them. And a screenshot of the service list as published, so you can check each line against what you actually do. For the sweep, ask for the list of places that were changed, with dates, and spot-check a few yourself from your phone.
Ryan, isn't that just filling out a form?
Yes. It is.
There is no secret in this chapter. A category, a list of services with real descriptions, current photos, true hours, a link that works, a reply under each review, the same phone number everywhere. Any owner can do it, and a good share of it is typing.
And yet more than half of the businesses that came to us arrived with the services part of that form missing, undescribed or copied from a template. <!-- B1 --> Not because they could not do it. Because the form does not ask to be finished. Nobody calls to remind you. Google does not send a bill when the services section is empty. The listing goes on quietly working, or quietly not working, while the owner is busy doing the actual job.
So yes, it is a form. It is also, for a lot of the people searching for you, your homepage. I would fill it out like one.
Tools and next.
The two tools the book points to, then the chapters on either side of this one.
Elevated Page Check
Click it on any page for a score out of 100, the fixes that matter most, and eight tabs that show the headings, links, photos, schema, share preview and business details behind the page, in plain English. For this chapter, start on the Local and Images tabs. Nothing it reads leaves your computer.
How it works and where to get it →Done for youFree online presence report
Your listing, your business details, your reviews, your site speed and the heat map, scored from the outside. It asks for your email so we can send it.
Get the report →Nearby chapters
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
Page last updated October 26, 2026. The steps get updated when Google changes something. Found a step that no longer matches your screen? Email ryan@elevatedideas.com or call or text (217) 724-8153.
Maintained by Elevated Ideas, a U.S.-based agency in Jacksonville, Illinois. All chapters.
Make the label match the drawer.
The free online presence report is the one thing in the book we ask you to let us run: the outside view of your listing, your details, your reviews, your speed and the map.
Prefer to talk? Call or text (217) 724-8153 or email ryan@elevatedideas.com.