MEO · 4 min read · Published 2026-09-09
The first four things to fix on a Google Business Profile
I want to fix our Google Business Profile. Where do I start?
Short answer
Before adding photos, deal with hours, categories, pre-visit fields and consistency with your other sources. While those are wrong, anything you add on top does not land.
1. Hours — including holidays and last orders
Plenty of businesses fill in regular hours and leave holidays and last orders empty. AI sometimes takes the shorter of the times it can find, which drops you out of “open now” questions.
If your hours move with the season, they need updating each time. This is not a one-off task.
2. Categories — matching what you actually offer
Make the primary category the most specific term customers would search. Secondary categories should cover adjacent services you genuinely offer. Stuffing in unrelated categories works against you.
3. The fields people check before visiting
Customers check before they travel. Left empty, these are what drop you from questions that carry conditions.
- Payment methods
- Seating type — private rooms, counter, tables
- Languages spoken
- Parking
- Whether you take bookings, and how
4. Disagreements with your other sources
Your own site, the booking platform, the map listing. When hours or a phone number differ across the three, AI has no way to decide which to trust — and tends to avoid saying much about a business whose facts conflict.
In practice this is both the easiest category of problem to find and the easiest to fix.
Sources and assumptions
- Field definitions follow Google Business Profile's published specification.
- The ordering reflects patterns seen repeatedly across aitani's audits; it is not a guarantee of any particular outcome.