Claim it, verify it, and then get four decisions right: your exact name, your real category, an honest answer about your address and hours, and a description that follows Google's rules instead of your instincts. The mechanics take an evening. The decisions are where profiles quietly go wrong, and a couple of them are hard to reverse, so they are worth understanding before you type anything.
We set ours up recently, and this walks through the calls we made, including the step we skipped and shouldn't have. The gaps are part of the lesson.
The name is a trap with a delay on it
Your business name on the profile must be your business name, exactly, with no city or service words bolted on. Ours reads "Pigasus Group," full stop, though "Pigasus Group | Business Intelligence Boone" would surely pull more searches for a while.
The temptation is real, because stuffed keywords do work for a while. They also violate Google's rules, and a keyword-stuffed name is one of the most common reasons new profiles get suspended, precisely when you have no history banking any goodwill. A suspension on a young profile can take weeks to appeal, during which you are invisible in the one place local customers most reliably look. The keyword was never worth that. Put the words in your description and your services, where they belong.
While you are being exact, whatever name, phone number, and area you enter here become the official spelling of your business for every machine that cross-checks identity. Freeze them. The same strings go on your website, your social profiles, and every directory, character for character. This is also why the phone number deserves a decision before the profile exists — a cheap, portable number you will never lose beats whichever number is handy today, because changing it later means chasing it across every listing you have built. Changing the name or address later is worse. It can re-trigger verification and reset the trust you have accumulated.
The category is the highest-leverage field on the form
Your primary category governs which searches you can appear in at all. It outranks the description, the photos, and the posts, and most owners give it four seconds.
Here is the trade we worked through on ours. "Marketing consultant" almost certainly carries more local search volume than "business management consultant." Choosing it as primary would also drop us into the most crowded category in town, competing on exactly the axis every other marketing shop competes on. We chose business management consultant as primary, because it is closer to what the work actually is, and kept marketing consultant as the additional category so those searches still find us. Thinner traffic, truer match.
The general form of the decision: Pick the category that matches what you are, not the one with the most traffic, and let additional categories catch the adjacent searches. Resist adding categories for things you do not sell. And know that the primary category can be swapped later without re-verification, so if the evidence eventually says the busier category is where your customers actually live, the switch is cheap. Make the honest choice first and let data argue for the change.
You don't owe the internet your address, or fake hours
If customers come to you, publish your address. If you go to them, or the work happens over calls and screens, Google supports a service-area business: Verify with a real address, hide it from the public profile, and declare the areas you serve instead. A home address does not belong on the internet permanently just because a form had a field for it. For the service area itself, think counties rather than towns — fewer entries, wider honest coverage, and no accidental implication that one village gets service its neighbor doesn't. Resist stretching to the big city two hours away; a service area past where you would actually drive dilutes the local signal that is the entire point.
Hours got the most thought on ours, because the honest answer was unusual. Standard business hours would claim somebody answers at 10am on a Tuesday, and for a consultancy run alongside other work, that is simply not true. A profile that says open when nobody picks up manufactures the "called, no answer" experience, and eventually the review that describes it. So our hours are blank, which Google permits, and the profile instead carries two attributes that tell the truth: appointment required, online appointments offered. If you work by appointment, say so with the attributes built for it. The wrong answer is aspirational hours.
What went in, and what we skipped
The description went in as written, and writing it taught us Google's rules for that field: no URLs, no prices, no promotions. Your best hook probably violates that — ours is a free assessment, and it is not allowed in the description. It lives on the website and in the services instead. What the description is for is what you do, who you serve, and where, in plain language a stranger and a machine can both lift.
Attributes are free identity you should not skip. Ours carries veteran-owned and LGBTQ+ friendly, both of which are search filters real people use.
And now the confession this checklist item earns its keep with. The services section of our profile, five services with descriptions, sat fully drafted in our own planning documents, and as of this week the live profile's services list is empty. Nobody entered them. The profile also has zero reviews and has been seen three times. That is what a verified, honestly configured, half-finished profile looks like, and we publish the state because it is the point of a checklist. The gap does not show up until something makes you look. Ours made us look this week.
One thing we deliberately left out
A technical aside for whoever maintains your website. It is tempting to add your Google profile's URL to the list of identity links in your site's code, the ones that tell machines "these profiles are all the same business." We deliberately did not. Google already knows who we are — it maintains its own record of the business — so citing Google back to Google proves nothing. The links that do the vouching are the ones Google can check independently: the LinkedIn page, the Chamber listing, the social accounts. Corroboration has to come from outside the courtroom.
The profile itself is the catcher's mitt of this whole checklist. It is where the searches, the AI answers, and the word-of-mouth checks all land. What fills it from here is not configuration but evidence — the reviews, which will eventually tell you more about your operations than you expect, and the photos and services we still owe ours. Setup is an evening. The profile is never finished, and the ones that look finished are the ones somebody keeps returning to.