Open your Google Business Profile right now and look at the primary category.
I’d put money on it being wrong, or at least lazy. Most businesses I audit in Bengaluru picked something vaguely correct in 2021, never went back, and have been quietly losing map pack positions to a competitor two streets away who picked better.
Here’s the short version, so you don’t have to read the rest to get the useful bit. Three things move your position in the map pack more than anything else you can control: your primary category, your service list, and your review velocity. Everything else on that profile is either a tie breaker or a conversion lever. And one thing you cannot control at all is proximity, which is why the gym 400 metres from the searcher beats you no matter how good your profile is.
So let’s go through the fields nobody touches.
Primary category is a ranking decision, not a description
Google treats your primary category as the single strongest relevance signal on the profile. It is not a label for humans. It is the thing that decides which searches you are even eligible to show up for.
The mistake I see constantly is picking the broad one. A studio in Indiranagar picks “Gym” when the actual money comes from personal training. A firm in Jayanagar picks “Business consultant” when every enquiry that pays is for GST filing.
Pick the category that matches what you want to sell most of. Then add the broad one as a secondary.
You get up to nine secondary categories. Almost nobody fills more than two. Add every category that genuinely describes something you do and get paid for, and stop there. Stuffing in categories you don’t service is how profiles get reported and suspended, and getting a suspension reversed in India is a genuinely miserable few weeks.
One more thing here. Categories change. Google adds and retires them quietly, sometimes a better fit for your business appears months after you set the profile up. Check yours twice a year.
The service list is free real estate and it’s empty
Under your categories there’s a services section. You can add individual services, each with a name and a 300 character description.
Nearly every profile I open has zero services listed.
This matters because those service names are text Google reads and matches against queries, and because they show up in the profile itself when someone taps through. A plumber with “bathroom leak repair”, “geyser installation” and “borewell pump repair” listed is eligible for a set of searches that “Plumber” alone does not cover well.
Write each description like a person would say it out loud. Not keyword soup. Something like:
Bathroom leak repair. Same day visit in most of east Bengaluru, we find the source before breaking any tiles, and we quote before starting.
Fifteen minutes of work. I’ve watched profiles pick up visibility on long tail searches within a fortnight of doing it.
Your description is probably too short
Google gives you 750 characters. The profiles that rank well tend to use around 70 words of it, according to the studies that have looked at this, and the ones sitting further down often have a single line or nothing at all.
Write it for a person who has never heard of you. What you do, who you do it for, which parts of the city you cover, and how long you’ve been doing it. Keyword stuffing does nothing here, it is not a ranking field in the way categories are, but a thin description reads as a thin business to anyone who bothers reading it.
Photos, and the bit about cadence
Everyone knows to add photos. Almost nobody keeps adding them.
The signal is not “does this profile have photos”, it is “is this business alive”. A profile with 40 photos, all uploaded on one afternoon in 2023, tells Google the same thing it tells a customer.
Add a few every month. Storefront, team, actual work in progress, whatever you shipped this week. Listings with proper visuals get meaningfully more clicks and direction requests, and direction requests are one of the behaviours Google can measure directly.
Do the festive ones too. Your Diwali setup, your Ugadi hours. It sounds trivial and it is exactly the kind of thing that makes a listing look like a real business run by real people.
Reviews: velocity beats volume
Two hundred reviews collected over four years is a weaker signal than forty collected over the last six months.
What you want is a steady trickle, forever. Two or three a week from a business doing decent volume is plenty. The way to get it is not a QR code on the counter that everyone ignores, it’s asking at the moment the customer is happiest, by name, over WhatsApp, with the direct review link.
Three things to not do:
- Don’t ask your staff to post reviews. Same device, same IP, and Google is fairly good at spotting it now.
- Don’t buy them. The Rs 3,000 for 50 reviews people is a fast route to a filtered profile.
- Don’t ignore the bad ones. A one star review with a calm, specific reply from the owner does more for the next reader than the four star average does.
The fields that do nothing for rank but decide whether they call
Once you’re showing up, a different set of fields decides whether the person taps call or taps back.
Hours, including holidays. A profile that says open when you’re shut earns you a one star review from someone standing outside your door. Set the festival hours in advance.
The Q&A section. Anyone can ask a question on your profile, and anyone can answer, including a competitor. Seed it yourself with the five questions you get asked on every phone call [do you have parking, do you do home visits, what’s the starting price] and answer them from the business account.
Messaging. Turn it on only if someone will actually reply within the hour. An unanswered message thread is worse than not offering it.
The booking or enquiry link. Send it to a page that matches the promise, not to your homepage. If someone tapped a listing for bridal makeup, they should land on bridal makeup.
What to do this week
Open the profile. Fix the primary category, add every secondary that’s genuinely true, and fill in the service list properly. That’s an hour of work and it’s the highest return hour available to most local businesses in this city.
Then set a reminder for the first of every month to add three photos and check the Q&A.
The businesses beating you in the map pack are usually not doing anything clever. They’re just doing the boring parts, consistently, while everyone else waits for a clever trick that isn’t coming.
If your profile is in decent shape and you’re still not showing up, the problem has moved to your website and your citations, and that’s a bigger conversation. My SEO notes walk through the order I’d check things in. And if you’d like to know how your issue could be solved, get in touch on email, WhatsApp, phone or LinkedIn. I’m not available for hire, but I’m always up for a quick chat about it.
Cheers!