Is Your Google Business Profile Quietly Costing You Customers?

The five things worth checking today

Your primary category is the one people get wrong most. "Plumber" and "Emergency plumber service" pull in different searches, and you can only pick one primary category. If you're not sure which one your competitors are using, it's worth a quick look — go incognito, search your service plus your suburb, and check what the top three profiles have set.

Photos matter too, and whether they're actually yours. Stock photos get spotted, by customers and, we suspect, by Google too. Profiles with real photos — your van, your team, a finished job — consistently pull more clicks than ones with a generic logo and nothing else.

Then there's your review response rate. Not just star rating. Whether you reply. A profile with 40 reviews and zero responses reads very differently to a customer than one with 25 reviews where the owner's clearly across it, thanking people, addressing the odd complaint properly instead of ignoring it.

NAP consistency trips up more businesses than you'd expect: Name, Address, Phone, and whether it matches exactly across your website, your Business Profile, and any directory you're listed on. A different phone number on one listing is more common than you'd think, especially after a business changes providers or moves office.

And almost nobody manages the Questions & Answers section, which means almost nobody notices when a competitor, or worse, a random stranger, has answered a customer's question incorrectly. Seed it yourself with the questions you actually get asked. It's free content Google trusts, sitting right there unused.

A quick story on why the "boring" stuff wins

We had a client, a small maintenance business in the Eastern Suburbs, who genuinely didn't want to touch their Business Profile. "It's fine," was the line. It wasn't fine. Wrong service area set, so it covered half of Sydney when they only serviced three suburbs, photos from 2019, and a phone number for a landline they'd disconnected two years earlier.

We fixed the basics. Nothing clever. Correct category, correct service area, real photos, a system for replying to reviews within 48 hours. Six weeks later, calls from the map pack had roughly doubled. Nobody wrote a single new blog post. Nobody built a backlink. It was entirely a profile hygiene fix.

That's usually how it goes with local SEO. The unglamorous stuff moves the needle faster than anything else, because so few businesses actually maintain it properly.

What this has to do with AI search

Worth flagging, because it's changing fast. When someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI Overviews "who's a good plumber near me," those answers increasingly pull from the same signals: consistent business details, real reviews, categories that match intent. A messy, half-abandoned Business Profile doesn't just hurt your map pack ranking anymore. It's also part of why AI tools might recommend someone else entirely when a customer asks for a recommendation instead of typing a search.

If you've read this far and you're not sure what state your own profile is in, that's genuinely the most common situation we see, not because business owners don't care, but because nobody tells you it needs ongoing attention. Search your business from an incognito tab, compare what you see to your three closest competitors, and start with whichever point above looks most out of date.

If you'd rather have someone run through it properly — categories, service areas, review strategy, the lot — that's exactly the kind of audit we do for local businesses across Sydney. Happy to have a look at yours.