When someone searches for “car repair near me” or “manicure nearby”, they don’t see your website. They see your business listing in Google Maps: the name, opening hours, photos, reviews. The decision “go or not” is often made right there. The listing is run by the owner or someone on the team, and usually it was filled in once and forgotten.
Below are six things you can check in five minutes, without a contractor. For each: what Google requires, what it can cost you, and where to change it. Button names are taken from Google’s English help pages for businesses; depending on the interface version, they may differ slightly. We checked the rules against Google’s Business Profile help on October 7, 2026. Where something is our own advice rather than a Google requirement, we say so.
How to open the listing for editing. Sign in to the Google account your business is verified with, find your business in Search or Maps, and click “Edit profile”. If there is no such button, the business probably isn’t verified yet, or access belongs to a former contractor.
1. The name: as on your sign
What Google requires. The name should be your real-world business name as it appears on your signage, stationery and website. The guidelines explicitly forbid adding marketing taglines, opening hours, a phone number, a website address, service descriptions or location info to the name. An example from the help page: “Regal Pizzeria Open 24 hours” is not acceptable.
What it can cost you. Owners often append “Car Repair London cheap” or “Beauty Salon open 24/7” to climb higher. Google’s help warns that including unnecessary information in the name isn’t permitted and could result in the suspension of your Business Profile. A suspended listing means you are invisible on Maps exactly when a customer is searching.
What practitioners say, and what Google says. Local search specialists often admit that a keyword in the name helps in practice to climb higher in Maps, and competitors use this. Google’s help says otherwise: the name must be real, and violations can lead to a report and suspension of the profile. Our advice: follow Google’s help, because the risk of vanishing from Maps outweighs a doubtful gain in position.
Ask yourself or your contractor: does the name in the listing match the sign letter for letter?
2. The category: one main and precise
What Google requires. You choose one primary category and, if needed, additional ones. The help advises using as few categories as possible and specific ones rather than general. Categories must not be used as keywords. The test: the category should complete the sentence “This business IS a…”, not “This business HAS a…”.
What it can cost you. The category is how Google understands what you do. If a repair shop is set to “Auto parts store” because a contractor once picked it, the system shows you to the wrong people. Here we rely on common sense, not numbers: the help page gives no ready statistics like “a category brings this many percent of impressions”, and we don’t invent them.
Ask: what is our main category and why that one?
3. Opening hours and holiday hours
What Google requires. You need to list the regular hours when you actually receive customers. For holidays and vacations there is a separate special schedule: in the profile you can set it for specific days without touching the main schedule.
What it can cost you. A customer arrives at a closed door while Maps said “open”. That is a lost customer and, quite possibly, a bad review. The listing is especially easy to forget before holidays and after a schedule change, when everyone remembers the sign but not the listing.
Ask: who updates our hours before holidays?
4. Phone and address
What Google requires. The address must be accurate, and businesses that travel to customers can give a service area instead of an address. A physical location is mandatory: P.O. boxes and mailboxes at remote locations are not acceptable. Breaking the address guidelines can also lead to suspension. In the profile you can add up to three phone numbers and a website.
Our advice (not a Google requirement). Phone, address and website should be identical in the listing, on your website and on social media: letter for letter. Different numbers in different places confuse customers and also whoever later tries to work out where an enquiry came from.
Practitioners’ advice (not a Google requirement). If the listing shows a call-tracking number (a separate number that shows which source a call came from), add the number from your website as an additional one, so the phone numbers don’t drift apart. You can also add a source tag (UTM) to the website address in the listing: the ending of the link that lets your analytics show how many visits came from the listing itself. Without it, those visits are hard to tell apart from other traffic.
Ask: does the number in the listing match the number on the website? If you run ads, even more so, because calls from the listing and from ads are easy to mix up.
5. Photos: real ones
What Google requires. Photos should be JPG or PNG, between 10 KB and 5 MB; the recommended size is 720×720 pixels, with a minimum of 250×250. Quality requirement: the photo should be in focus and well lit, with no significant alterations or excessive use of filters. The help suggests adding an exterior photo so customers can recognize the place when they arrive.
What it can cost you. The help page doesn’t explicitly ban pictures from the internet, but the logic of the requirement is simple: photos should show your real business. A customer who saw an “ideal” hall from a photo bank and walked into a different one is disappointed before the conversation begins.
What to add: the entrance, the hall or workshop, the team, your work. Not pictures from the internet.
6. Reviews: reply to all, don’t delete, don’t buy
What Google requires. A verified business owner can reply to a review: in the profile you open reviews and click “Reply”. An owner cannot delete a customer’s review. If a review violates Google’s content policies, you can flag it, and Google will look into it. A review you simply dislike doesn’t violate the rules.
About gifts for reviews. This is the most important point. Under Google’s rules, offering incentives such as payment, discounts or free goods or services in exchange for posting a review, changing it, or removing a negative review is prohibited. It counts as fake engagement, and according to the help page such content will be removed. Business Profile help adds that violations can lead to profile restrictions. What is allowed is different: reminding a customer to leave a review, for example by giving a direct link or a QR code.
What practitioners say, and what Google says. Materials on local search often recommend a “small incentive”: a discount or a coffee for a review, so that there are more reviews. Google’s rules are unambiguous here: offering discounts, gifts or payment for a review is prohibited. Our position: asking is fine, paying or giving gifts for a review is not.
What it can cost you. A “review for a discount” promotion seems innocent, but the reviews it brings can vanish and the listing can get restrictions.
Two more rules about collecting reviews. Google prohibits requiring staff to collect a certain number of reviews (such as “five reviews per shift”) and reviews that name a specific employee (“write that Ivan served you”). We checked these against Google’s Maps policy on reviews on 7 October 2026. You can ask customers for a review, but without per-person targets and without hints about what exactly to write.
Ask: who replies to reviews and within how many days? Have we promised customers anything for a review?
How to reply to negative ones. Calmly and to the point: say thanks, briefly say that you understood, and offer a solution. This is our advice, not a Google rule. Your reply is seen not only by the author but by all future customers.
From practice: two traps
The listing and your ads. In our experience, the link between the listing and the ad account breaks from time to time, and then the addresses from the listing stop being pulled into the ads. We check this every time we look at an account. If you run ads, ask whoever runs them now and then: are the addresses from the listing still connected?
Two companies at one address. Practitioners describe a case where Google merged the listings of two different companies that shared a warehouse into one, and splitting them back was practically impossible. This is experience from industry materials, not a rule from Google’s help. If you open a second business at the address of the first, give it its own name, phone number and listing instead of adding it to the old one.
What stays with you
A five-minute list:
- The name matches the sign, with no “cheap” and no address.
- One main category, an accurate one.
- Hours are current, the holiday schedule is set.
- Phone, address and website match the website and social media.
- Photos are real: entrance, hall, team, work.
- Every review has a reply, no gifts for reviews.
If the listing belongs to nobody or access is lost, restore access first: without it you can’t fix the rest.
The Maps listing works together with advertising. You can read how we run ads for local businesses in the advertising for local business section and on the search advertising page. For which settings Google turns on without your say-so, including photos from your business profile in ads, see our article what Google Ads turns on by itself.
Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request — we will look at your account and tell you what is worth changing so that more customers come from Maps.