Your Google Business Profile is seen more times in a typical week than your website is. Most business owners have never thought about that. Even fewer have done anything with it since the day they claimed it.
Picture this. Someone in Qualicum Beach is looking for a plumber on a Saturday afternoon. They don't go to a website. They open Google Maps, type what they need, and two businesses come up in the local pack. The first has 34 reviews, a handful of job photos, accurate hours for the long weekend, and a post from earlier in the week. The second has its address listed somewhere three blocks from where it actually operates — it moved last year and nobody updated the listing.
The second one doesn't get the call. Not because they're worse plumbers. Just because Google doesn't trust what it's looking at.
I see this constantly when I'm doing local SEO audits across Vancouver Island. Business owners will tell me they set up their Google Business Profile years ago and it's all good. Then I pull it up and find outdated hours, a category that doesn't quite fit, three photos — two of which are blurry — and a string of unanswered questions in the Q&A section.
The profile exists. But it isn't working.
The map pack is where local search actually happens
When someone searches for a service in a specific place — "electrician in Courtenay", "physio near me in Sidney", "best fish and chips in Campbell River" — Google shows them the local pack first. That three-business box, with the map, that appears above the regular search results. That's the real estate everyone is competing for.
Organic website rankings matter. But for most small businesses on Vancouver Island, the local pack is where the phone rings. And the local pack is driven almost entirely by your Google Business Profile — not your website.
Which means a lot of people are pouring effort into their websites while completely ignoring the thing that has more direct control over their visibility in local search. I'm not saying ignore your website — a proper SEO audit looks at both, because they work together. But if I had to pick one thing that gets the least attention relative to how much it matters, it's the GBP.
What Google actually rewards in a profile
Google ranks local businesses based on three broad signals: relevance (does your profile match what the person searched?), distance (how close are you to the searcher?), and prominence (does Google have reason to trust you?).
You can't do much about distance — you are where you are. But relevance and prominence are both things you can influence directly through how you manage your profile.
Relevance comes mostly from choosing the right primary and secondary categories. A lot of businesses get this wrong by picking something too broad ("contractor" instead of "roofing contractor") or something that doesn't quite fit. The categories you choose tell Google exactly what searches you should appear in — it's worth spending twenty minutes getting them right.
Prominence comes from reviews, photos, activity, and consistency. Google wants to see a profile that belongs to a real, active, trustworthy business. One that updates its hours when they change. One that responds when customers ask questions. One that looks like someone actually tends to it.
The four things worth your attention
I'm not going to give you a list of forty items to optimise. That's not how this works. Here are the four that genuinely move the needle for most Vancouver Island small businesses:
- Categories. Your primary category is the most important field on the entire profile. Get specific. If you're a general contractor who mostly does renovations, "General Contractor" is probably right — but if you do almost exclusively kitchen and bath work, there's a better category for that. Secondary categories help you show up for related searches too.
- Reviews. This one deserves its own article — and I'll write it soon — but the short version is this: the number of reviews you have, and how recent they are, is one of the strongest signals in local search. If you have four reviews from 2021, that's a problem. Not just for rankings. For trust.
- Photos. Real photos of real work. Not stock images. A kitchen you renovated in Nanaimo, a job site in Langford, a finished deck in the Cowichan Valley. Google indexes the content of photos and it signals to potential customers that you're legitimate. Six good photos of actual work beats thirty generic ones every time.
- Posts and updates. Google Business Profile lets you post updates — seasonal hours, new services, completed projects. Most businesses never use this. The ones that do stay active in Google's eyes, which matters for how often the profile gets surfaced.
A routine that takes less time than you think
Here's the honest version of what staying on top of this looks like. It's not a full-time job. It's closer to a monthly check-in that takes half an hour if you do it regularly.
Once when you first set it up (or fix it, if it's been neglected): audit every field. Business name exactly as it appears on your signage. Address exactly as it appears on Canada Post. Phone number. Website. Hours — including special hours for stat holidays. Categories. Description. Make sure everything is accurate and consistent with how your business appears everywhere else online. Inconsistencies across directories are a trust signal Google notices.
Then, on a regular basis: add a photo when you finish a job you're proud of. Post an update every few weeks — even just "we're booking into August" or "now offering X service." And respond to reviews when they come in, good or bad. A brief, genuine response to a negative review does more for your reputation than ten unanswered five-stars.
That's it. You don't need to become a digital marketer. You just need to stop treating it as something you set up once and forgot about.
If you're not sure what shape your profile is in — or how it stacks up against competitors in your market — that's exactly what the local SEO portion of an SEO audit covers. I look at your GBP alongside your website and tell you plainly what's working, what isn't, and what's worth fixing first.
Written by Michael Perks — Island Rank Canada, Duncan, BC. I do hands-on SEO audits for small businesses across Vancouver Island. If your Google Business Profile hasn't been looked at properly in a while, the contact page is a good place to start.