What Google actually says decides your ranking
Google publishes its own guidance on this, so there's no need to guess. In Google Business Profile Help's "Tips to improve your local ranking", Google names three factors that decide where a business shows up in local search: relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well your profile matches what someone is searching for. Distance is how far your business is from the location implied in the search. Prominence is how well-known your business is, including how it's reviewed, and how much information is available about it.
Each of the eight questions in this checklist maps to one of those factors, not to a guess about what "feels" important. Category accuracy and complete profile information are relevance signals. Google can only match your business to a search if it understands, from what you've told it, what your business actually does and offers. A generic or wrong category is one of the most common ways a real trade business fails to show up for searches it should be winning. Verification matters too: Google presents it as a basic step toward a complete profile, and an unverified listing is missing a signal every complete profile has.
Primary category: the single biggest lever on this list
If you only fix one thing after running this checklist, make it the category. Google's own guidance on managing your business category is specific about this: choose the most specific category available, not a broad one, and the primary category should describe what the business is, not everything it does. "Plumber" beats "Home services," and "Emergency plumber" beats "Plumber" if it's genuinely accurate. A generic or slightly wrong primary category is one of the most common, and most fixable, reasons a real trade business fails to turn up for searches it should win every time.
You get up to nine additional categories beyond the primary one, and it's worth using a handful of them for genuine specialities (drain camera inspections, hot water system installs, gas fitting), but don't list a category for every service you offer. Google's guidance is clear that categories describe what the business is, not a checklist of everything it does. Piling on categories that don't fit dilutes relevance rather than improving it.
Service area or a shopfront: not the same setting
Most trades aren't retail businesses with a shopfront customers walk into. They're service-area businesses, someone who visits the customer rather than the other way around, and Google treats that as a genuinely different profile setup. If you don't serve customers at your business address, Google's guidance on managing service areas says to hide that address on the profile and define your service area instead, by suburb, postcode or region.
Getting this setting wrong in either direction causes real problems. Showing an address you don't actually operate from as a public storefront (a home address, a shared office you rent by the hour) is against Google's guidelines and puts the whole profile at risk. Leaving the service area badly defined, too broad, too narrow, or just never set, means Google has less information to match you against a nearby search than it should.
Asking for reviews properly, and legally, in Australia
Reviews are a genuine prominence signal, and asking happy customers to leave one is completely fine. Paying for reviews, writing your own under a customer's name, or offering a discount specifically in exchange for a positive review is not fine, and it's not just a Google policy problem. The ACCC's guidance on managing online reviews treats fake or manipulated reviews as a form of misleading conduct under Australian Consumer Law, with real penalties attached, not a slap on the wrist.
The honest version of asking for reviews is simple enough: ask every customer, not just the ones you're confident will say something glowing, and ask close to when the job finished while it's still front of mind. A text with a direct link, sent the same day the job wraps up, gets more genuine responses than a generic request weeks later. Some businesses automate that follow-up so it happens the same way every time instead of depending on someone remembering to send it, which is the kind of thing our AI automation work sets up.
What a suspension looks like, and what causes one
A suspended profile disappears from Google Maps and search entirely, not just drops in ranking, and it can take weeks to sort out once it happens. Google's guidelines for representing your business on Google list the common causes, and most of them are things a legitimate business does by accident rather than anything deliberate: a business name that has a service or location keyword stuffed into it ("Smith Plumbing Melbourne Emergency 24/7" instead of just the actual business name), a wrong or duplicate address, a category that doesn't match what the business actually does, or a profile flagged by a competitor or an automated check for something that looks off.
The practical takeaway is to keep the profile boring in the right ways: real business name, accurate category, one listing, real address settings. Suspensions are recoverable but genuinely disruptive while they last, and the businesses that avoid them tend to be the ones that never gave Google a reason to look twice.
Duplicate and unclaimed listings
It's more common than most business owners realise: a second, older listing for the same business floating around, sometimes created by a directory, sometimes by an old employee, sometimes by Google itself pulling business details from somewhere on the web. A duplicate splits your reviews across two profiles instead of concentrating them on one, and it can show an old address or an old phone number to someone searching, which does real damage to the NAP consistency this checklist covers.
Search your own business name on Google Maps periodically to check for a second listing you didn't create. If you find one, Google lets you flag it for merging. It's a five-minute check worth doing every so often, because a duplicate listing doesn't announce itself. It just quietly sits there splitting the prominence signals this checklist is trying to build up.
Distance is the one factor you can't touch
It's worth being upfront about the one factor that isn't on this checklist at all: distance. It's set by where the person searching is standing, not by anything a business does. You can't move your service area closer to a customer by editing your profile. That's exactly why this checklist doesn't ask about it. Everything here is deliberately about the two factors a business can actually influence: how relevant your profile reads to Google, and how prominent your business appears once it's found.
Recent photos, review responses and periodic posts are all prominence signals in the most literal sense. They're evidence to Google, and to a searcher scanning results, that the business is active and genuinely operating, not a stale listing nobody's touched in years. Responding to reviews, positive and negative alike, does double duty: it's a prominence signal Google can read, and it's also just good practice for anyone who lands on the profile and reads the reviews before calling. Consistent hours, especially around public holidays, matter for the same reason from a different angle. A business with wrong hours sends a searcher elsewhere the moment they show up to a locked door.
The last two items (matching phone number and website, and a consistent address everywhere the business is listed) feed prominence through a mechanism most business owners never think about: NAP consistency, meaning your Name, Address and Phone number match exactly across your Google profile, your own website, Facebook and any directories you're listed on. When they do, it reinforces to Google that all of those listings describe the same real business. When they don't (an old address still floating on a directory, a phone number that's changed on the site but not on Google), it introduces doubt into exactly the signal Google is trying to establish.
Why the map pack specifically is worth the effort
The map pack is the block of local results, with the map, that appears above the regular organic listings for a large share of local searches ("plumber near me," "electrician [suburb]," and every close variant of them). It's usually the first thing most people see and tap on a phone, well before they scroll to the organic results underneath it. For a trade business whose customers are searching locally and want someone now, the map pack is arguably more valuable than a page-one organic ranking, because it comes with your rating, your hours and a call button already visible before anyone clicks through to a website at all.
Most businesses treat their Google profile as something you set up once and leave, verify it, fill in the basics, done. The checklist above should make it obvious that's leaving prominence signals on the table: photos going stale, reviews sitting unanswered, hours never checked against the next public holiday. None of those are hard to fix, and none of them cost anything beyond attention. Genuinely local SEO work treats profile completeness as one lever among several, alongside the on-site relevance signals and citation consistency that reinforce it, rather than something to configure once and forget.
If your score above has real gaps in it, closing them is usually quicker and cheaper than most other SEO work, because it doesn't require building anything new, just finishing what's already half set up. Keeping it that way over time (posting, responding, refreshing photos, checking hours before every public holiday) is exactly the kind of ongoing task our Google Business Profile management work is built to keep on top of, alongside the wider business systems that stop it slipping again, and it's worth checking what that costs against our pricing before assuming it's a bigger job than it is.