What the profile does
A Google Business Profile is the listing people see when they search for you or for a kind of business near them. It shows your hours, photos, reviews, a map pin and a button to your website. It is free, and for a local business it is often the first thing a customer sees.
Google's help pages list what an owner can edit: the business name, categories, address or service area, hours (including special holiday hours), the website link, photos, a description, and for food businesses a menu.
What the website adds
The profile is short by design. The website has room for everything the profile cannot hold: every service explained, the full menu, your story, answers to common questions and a form to reach you. A person who taps through from your profile should land somewhere that confirms they are in the right place and answers their next question.
The website link
The link on your profile should be the full web address of your site, including the https at the start. Google also says to make sure its crawler is not blocked from your site. Some business categories can add extra links too, such as for orders, reservations or appointments, which is useful for a restaurant or a salon with its own booking tool.
Reviews live on the profile
Your reviews belong to your Google profile, and they are written by your customers, not by you or us. We do not post them for you. The free mock-up uses the public ones to show what your homepage could say about you, and the best thing you can do for them is to keep answering them yourself, kindly and briefly.
Keep the facts matching
Your name, address, hours and services should be the same on your profile, on your site and anywhere else you are listed. A mismatch confuses customers and can confuse search too. Your site can also carry structured data, hidden code that states your name, address and hours in a form Google can read, which supports the same facts the profile shows.
Common mix-ups
The profile links to an old site, or to a social page instead of the website. The hours on the profile are not the hours on the site. The business name on the profile has extra words added to it, when Google says the name should match your real-world signage and branding. Or the profile shows one address while the site shows another. Each is small, and each makes a customer wonder which one is right.
Who does what
The profile is yours to run. That means keeping hours and special hours up to date, adding photos, answering reviews, and keeping the description accurate. It is a few minutes a week for most owners. The website is where we come in.