The short answer
Get the primary category right, remove duplicates, make every detail agree with your website and your directory listings, and build a review process your team can actually run. Those four account for most of the available gain.
Posts, photos and product listings help at the margin. They are not where a suppressed profile is losing.
Why the primary category matters more than anything
Your primary category is the single strongest signal determining which searches you are eligible to appear for. A plumber listed primarily as a contractor will struggle on plumbing searches regardless of how good everything else is.
Two rules that are easy to get wrong:
- Be specific, not broad. The most accurate narrow category beats a general one. Broad categories feel safer and perform worse.
- Secondary categories are additive, not equal. They widen eligibility a little; they do not share the weight of the primary.
If you only change one thing on a neglected profile, review the primary category against what you actually want to be found for.
Duplicates: the silent suppressor
Duplicate listings split your signals and frequently suppress the one you are maintaining. They appear more often than owners expect, because they are rarely created deliberately.
Common sources:
- A listing created by Google from third-party data years ago.
- A previous address that was never properly removed.
- A former employee's profile for the same business.
- A listing created by an agency during a campaign.
- A serviced office address shared with other businesses.
Search for your business name, phone number and address separately. The duplicate you find is rarely under the name you searched first.
Service area or address: which should you use?
A question with a clear answer that is often got wrong, usually for understandable reasons.
| Situation | What to use | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Customers come to you | A displayed address | Proximity to the searcher is a strong factor |
| You travel to customers | Service areas, address hidden | Required, and a hidden address is fine |
| Both | Address shown, plus service areas | Legitimate and common |
| Virtual office you do not staff | Neither | Risks suspension and does not work anyway |
That last row matters. Listing an address you do not actually staff is a suspension risk, and proximity to a serviced office does not help you appear where your customers are. Service areas exist precisely for businesses that travel.
Consistency is the whole game
Your name, address and phone number should be identical everywhere: your profile, your website, your directory listings, your invoices and your social profiles. Not similar, identical.
Variations that cause trouble: Ltd versus Limited, St versus Street, a tracking phone number used in one place and the real one elsewhere, and an old suite number that was never updated after a move.
This matters for the same reason it matters in AI search: when sources disagree, the system has to decide which to trust, and the resolution is not in your favour. The two disciplines are closer than they look, which is why we cover them together on our local SEO page.
Reviews: a process, not a campaign
Reviews influence both ranking and whether anyone contacts you after they find you. The failure mode is treating them as an occasional push rather than something built into how you work.
- Ask at the point the customer is most pleased, which is rarely when it is convenient for you.
- Make the link trivially short and send it while they are still thinking about you.
- Reply to every review, including the good ones, briefly and like a person.
- Reply to negative reviews factually and without arguing. Other readers are the audience.
- Never buy reviews, never incentivise them, and never gate them so only happy customers are asked.
That last point is not only an ethical one. Review gating is against Google's policy and is detectable, and the damage from enforcement is worse than a mediocre average.
What about multi-location businesses?
Multi-location is where the most breakage is, and the faults are consistent.
| Fault | Effect | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| One phone number across branches | Branches merge in Google's eyes | A unique number per branch |
| Location pages that are one template | Treated as duplicates | Genuinely different content |
| One profile managing several sites | Only one ranks | A profile per staffed location |
| Inconsistent naming between branches | Weak entity signal | One naming convention |
The template problem is the commonest and the most ignored. A page that differs only by the town name gives neither a search engine nor an assistant a reason to treat it as a separate thing.
What if the profile gets suspended?
Suspensions usually follow an address or category problem rather than anything dramatic. The instinct is to appeal immediately, which is normally a mistake.
Find and fix the likely cause first: an address you do not staff, a category that misrepresents the business, a name stuffed with keywords, or details that contradict the rest of the web. Then appeal once, clearly, with the correction already made.
Repeated appeals without a fix tend to make reinstatement harder rather than more likely.
The mistakes that quietly cost the most
These are the faults we find most often on profiles that look fine at a glance. None of them produces a warning.
| Mistake | Why it is costly | How to check |
|---|---|---|
| Wrong primary category | Decides eligibility more than anything else | Compare against what you want to be found for |
| Hours that are wrong or missing | Suppresses you in open now searches | Check bank holidays and seasonal hours |
| A tracking phone number only here | Breaks consistency with every other source | Compare against your website and invoices |
| Description written for search engines | Reads badly and helps nothing | Read it aloud; would you say it? |
| No products or services listed | Misses a strong relevance signal | List the services people actually search |
| Photos from five years ago | Affects contact rate, not ranking | Check the most recent upload date |
The third row is worth dwelling on. Call tracking numbers are useful, but a number that exists only on the profile and nowhere else creates exactly the inconsistency that weakens the entity. If you use tracking, use a number that appears consistently or use the forwarding feature designed for it.
A sensible monthly routine
Profiles decay through neglect and through edits you did not make. Google accepts suggested edits from the public, and they can change your hours, category or even close your listing.
A short monthly check catches most of it:
- Open the profile and confirm nothing has been changed by a suggested edit.
- Check hours against anything seasonal or a bank holiday coming up.
- Reply to any reviews from the last month, including the positive ones.
- Search your business name, phone and address to catch a new duplicate.
- Add one genuine photo, which takes a minute and keeps the profile looking live.
- Note anything that changed since last month, so movement can be attributed later.
Ten minutes, monthly, catches more than an annual overhaul does, because the damage from a bad suggested edit compounds for however long it goes unnoticed.
How this connects to AI search
Everything above is also entity work. Assistants read your profile, your website and the directories, and they reach the same conclusion a search engine does when those sources disagree: trust something else.
Which is why local businesses are frequently described by assistants using a directory's version of their details rather than their own. Fixing the profile is one of the cheapest AI visibility improvements available, and almost nobody frames it that way.
If you want to see what assistants currently say about your business, our free AI visibility audit will show you, alongside the local issues causing it.