What is Google Business Profile?
A Google Business Profile is the free listing that puts a business on Google Maps and in local search results, showing its name, hours, photos, reviews, services and website link.
Also called: GBP, Google My Business, GMB.
For a local business it is often more valuable than the website itself, because it is where the phone call actually starts. Someone searching "barber near me" may never leave the results page: they see hours, a rating, five photos and a call button, and that is enough.
Google rewards profiles that look actively maintained. Categories chosen precisely rather than broadly, services and products listed, photos added regularly, questions answered, posts published, reviews replied to. A profile filled in once in 2021 competes badly against one touched this month.
It also has to agree with your website. If your hours differ, your phone number is formatted differently, or your service list doesn't match, you are asking Google to pick a version to trust — and diluting your local ranking in the process.
What to actually do about it
- Claim and verify the profile before anything else.
- Pick the most specific primary category, then add secondary ones.
- Upload real photos monthly — exterior, interior, team, work in progress.
- Reply to every review, good and bad, within a few days.
- Mirror hours, phone and services exactly on your website.
Koo connects to your Google Business Profile, surfaces gaps and unanswered reviews in one hub, and keeps your site's hours, categories and service list in step with the listing.
Related terms
Local SEO
Local SEO is the work of getting a business found by people searching nearby — in the Google map pack, in "near me" queries and on maps apps — and depends mostly on a complete Google Business Profile, consistent business details across the web, and location-specific pages.
Schema markup
Schema markup is a block of machine-readable data added to a web page — usually as JSON-LD — that tells search engines and AI assistants exactly what the page is about: a business, a product, an article, a review, a set of questions.