Three changes to a Google Business Profile do most of the work of getting a local firm called: set the right primary category, complete every field Google asks for (photos included), and keep reviews recent and replied to. Each has a mechanism you can point to, either in Google’s own documentation or in measured consumer behaviour - which is more than can be said for most “optimise your profile” advice.
One thing to hold on to before spending money with anyone: Google’s ranking documentation says plainly that “there’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google”. Local results are ranked on three factors - relevance, distance and prominence. Distance is your postcode, so you can’t move it. The three changes below work on the other two.
The primary category decides which searches you’re eligible for
Relevance, in Google’s definition, is “how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for”, and the primary category is the bluntest input to it. Google’s category help page spells out the mechanism with its own example: if your primary category is “Pizza restaurant”, your business might show in local results for “Restaurants”, “Italian Restaurants” or “Pizza”. In other words, the primary category determines which searches your profile is even considered for. Get it wrong and the rest of the profile never gets a chance to compete.
Two rules follow from Google’s guidance. Pick the most specific category that describes the business - Google’s example is choosing “Nail salon” rather than “Salon”. And use additional categories only for genuinely distinct lines of work, the way Google suggests a grocery shop might add “Bakery” and “Deli”; the same page says not to select a category for every product or service you offer.
The five-minute check: open the profile and ask whether the primary category names the job that brings your most profitable calls. If you’d describe the business one way on the phone but the category says something vaguer, change it.
Completeness is documented; the famous photo statistic is not
Google’s stated mechanism for completeness is short and worth taking literally: “Businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results.” The information Google recommends includes your full address, phone number, what kind of business you are, and the practical details customers ask about, such as parking. For a service firm that means accurate hours, service areas and a number that gets answered. Boring fields, filled in.
Photos sit inside the same mechanism. Google’s framing is that they let you “show customers what you offer and tell the story of your business” - vans, finished jobs, the team. What Google does not publish is a number. The statistic repeated across SEO blogs, that profiles with photos get 42% more direction requests and 35% more website clicks, does not appear on Google’s current help pages (we checked in June 2026); only third-party blogs carry it. Add photos because a customer comparing three local firms will look at them, not because of a percentage nobody can trace to its source.
Reviews: recency convinces the customer, volume helps the ranking
These are two different mechanisms, and it pays to keep them separate. On ranking, Google documents that “more reviews and positive ratings can help your business’s local ranking”, and that prominence is based partly on how many reviews you have. Nowhere does Google’s documentation list review recency as a ranking input.
Recency matters for a different, measurable reason: the people reading. In BrightLocal’s 2026 consumer survey (1,002 US adults, so US behaviour rather than UK - but the clearest data available), 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses, and Google is the most-used platform at 71%. On freshness, 74% look for reviews written in the last three months, 32% want reviews from the last two weeks (up from 20% a year earlier), and 18% only trust reviews from the last week. A profile whose newest review is eight months old fails the recency test for roughly three in four review-readers, however glowing the old ones are.
The fix is a habit, not a campaign. Take a two-van heating and plumbing firm completing around 40 jobs a month - an illustrative scale, so adjust to your own. If every customer is asked at job completion and 1 in 10 leaves a review (also illustrative), that is about 4 new Google reviews a month, and the newest is rarely more than a week or two old. That clears the three-month bar 74% of consumers apply, and usually the stricter two-week bar applied by 32%. Asking is fine: Google publishes a help page specifically on how to get more reviews.
The star average is also getting less forgiving: 31% of consumers now say they will only use a business rated 4.5 stars or higher, up from 17% in 2025, and 68% require at least 4 stars, up from 55%. The arithmetic is worth doing before assuming a move is out of reach. A firm on 4.4 stars from 38 reviews (illustrative numbers) holds 4.4 × 38 = 167.2 star-points; reaching a true 4.5 average needs (167.2 + 5n) ÷ (38 + n) ≥ 4.5, which solves at 8 consecutive five-star reviews - two months at the review rate above. How Google rounds the rating it displays isn’t documented in the sources we used, so treat this as reaching a true 4.5 average, not a promise about what shows on screen.
Reply to every review - the next customer is the real audience
Google’s own wording gives the game away: “your replies are public”. A reply isn’t really for the reviewer; it’s read by the next person deciding whether to call. The consumer data justifies the effort: 89% expect business owners to respond to reviews, 81% expect it within a week, and 80% say they’re likely to use a business that responds to all of its reviews. Skip the copy-and-paste, though - 50% say generic templated responses make them unlikely to choose the business.
At 4 reviews a month this costs perhaps 15–20 minutes a week (illustrative), including the occasional bad one. On those, Google’s guidance is unusually reassuring: negative reviews “aren’t necessarily a sign of poor business practices”, a positive reply and follow-up may encourage the customer to update their review, and “a mix of positive and negative feedback often feels more trustworthy”. One calmly handled complaint can do more for trust than another five-star rave.
Do the one-off fixes once, then build the habit
The category and the empty fields are an afternoon’s work, done once. The compounding change is the review routine: ask at every job completion, reply to everything within the week. If you do one thing after reading this, build that ask into how a job ends - the recency figures say a steady trickle of new reviews beats any pile of historic praise. And if the wider setup needs attention too (service pages, consistent name-address-phone), start with the local SEO basics most UK small firms still get wrong; this piece is the deeper cut on the profile itself.
