Guide: Google Business Profile

The first thing that throws people: the separate dashboard is gone. The business.google.com console was retired at the end of 2024, and the advice to “go to your Google My Business account”, still all over the internet, sends you looking for a button that no longer exists.

Here is how it works now. You create the listing at google.com/business. After that, if you have a single location, you manage it straight from Search: signed in as the owner, type your business name and the listing opens with its editing buttons. The same works in the Google Maps app. The separate manager only remains for businesses with several locations.

One practical conclusion worth money: create the listing on the Google account that will stay yours. A listing created on a former contractor’s address is recovered through an access-reclaim procedure, and that means weeks of correspondence with support.

The name. It must hold what the business is actually called — no city, no list of services, no slogan, no phone number. “Ivan — création de sites web Marseille” works in the short run, which is exactly why the temptation is strong. What follows is predictable: Google edits the name itself, or a competitor reports it, and on a repeat comes a partial suspension. The listing stays on Maps, but you lose control of it: you cannot answer a review or change the hours. Getting it back through appeal takes a month and often longer.

The address. It is the actual place of business. If you do not receive clients there, the address is hidden — how that works is below. Google will still ask for it at registration: the address is used for verification and for distance calculations, but it is not made public.

The category. There is one primary category, and it is what decides which searches you appear in at all. Take the most precise one from Google’s list, not the broadest: “Website designer” brings clients, “Business service” brings nobody. Add secondary categories only for what you actually do — the rest dilute and get in the way.

Until the listing is verified, it does not appear anywhere. That is the first disappointment: everything is filled in, everything looks good, and nobody can find it.

Google assigns the verification method itself; you usually do not get to choose from a list. Most often now it is video. The clip has to be continuous and unedited, and it has to show three things: where you are (the street, the surroundings, the number), the sign or plaque carrying the same name as the listing, and proof that you really work there — opening the door with your own key, showing equipment, tools, your workspace, a document in the business name. Review takes up to five working days.

The postcard with a code takes up to fourteen days. After verification the listing needs a few more days to appear. Plan for one to two weeks between request and visibility, not one evening.

If you are refused, you can apply again — but remove the cause first: a name that does not match the sign, an address where you are not physically present, or an activity that is not eligible. A repeat request with the same flaw gets the same answer.

This is the mode for people who travel to clients — repairs, cleaning, delivery, on-site consulting — and for everyone working from home. The rules here are stricter than people assume.

No more than twenty areas. The boundary of the whole area: roughly two hours’ drive from where you are based. A whole region or country cannot be entered, Google rejects those values. And the address you work from must be hidden: home addresses are not shown on Maps.

The temptation to “set it wide, you never know” hurts twice. First, a wide area adds no impressions: Google ranks by actual proximity to whoever is searching, not by declared coverage. Second, an area covering half of France looks like a listing filed in the wrong place, and it attracts a review.

You are in France — so the name, the description and the services go in French.

The name is best kept the same as the one you are registered under: a mismatch between your sign, your listing and the entry attached to your SIREN is one more reason for a check.

Public-holiday hours are a topic of their own in France, and they are exactly where clients get lost. Dates to set in advance: 1 January, Easter Monday, 1 May, 8 May, Ascension, Whit Monday, 14 July, 15 August, 1 and 11 November, 25 December. Plus August, when half the country is away.

Answer reviews in the language of the review.

Asking for reviews is allowed and necessary: without the first five or ten, the listing looks empty. But this is where people get caught most often, because what is forbidden looks harmless.

You may not ask selectively — only the people who were happy. That is called review gating, and Google deletes the entire accumulated set of reviews for it, and may suspend the listing. You have to ask everyone the same way, whatever the job ended in.

You may not offer a reward in any form: a discount, a gift, free work, a prize draw — including in exchange for someone amending or removing a bad review. You may not set yourself targets for the number of reviews, or ask that a particular member of staff be named. You may not collect reviews on a shared tablet or kiosk on your premises. And you may not write them yourself — nor may your family, friends or staff.

In France, the law is added on top of Google’s rules. Spreading false reviews is a misleading commercial practice, article L.121-4 of the consumer code: up to two years’ imprisonment and a 300 000 € fine, which for a company can be set as a percentage of turnover, with online commission treated as an aggravating circumstance. And enforcement is not random: the DGCCRF runs an algorithm called Polygraphe, which has been through more than a thousand establishments since July 2023. Buying reviews is not a grey area, it is an offence.

The reply is read by your future clients, not by the author of the review. That is the only thing to hold on to at the moment you want to argue.

The working shape of a reply to a bad review is three sentences. Thank the person for writing. State the fact briefly, without argument and without settling who was right. Say what has been done, or offer to continue privately. That is all. Justifications, “you should have” and the full account of the affair serve you, not the reader.

What not to write: the client’s name and details that identify them; promises you will not keep; and the same template under every review — it shows immediately.

Better to reply within a few days, while the review is at the top. Reply to good reviews too, briefly: a listing with replies looks alive, an unanswered one looks abandoned.

The situation is ordinary: a review from a person who was never your client, or from a competitor. The order of actions is this.

Report the review from the listing itself, giving the reason — conflict of interest, spam, off topic. Review usually takes from three days to two weeks. If it is refused, there is an appeal: another one to three weeks.

Honestly, about the odds: far from everything gets removed, and almost nothing without evidence. What works is showing that no client of that name came on that date: correspondence, a booking record, an invoice, a receipt. What does not work is “this is untrue” with no document at all.

If the review is plainly false and damaging, France offers a legal route — the same article L.121-4 — but that means a lawyer, and it does not pay off in every case. The practical advice instead: a dozen genuine reviews and a couple of calm replies smother one fake more reliably than months of appeals.

Guides older than a year send you looking for features that no longer exist. What has been closed:

Chat and call history — since July 2024. Questions and answers: the public block began disappearing in December 2025, programmatic access was cut off in November. In its place Google answers users’ questions itself, assembling the reply from your listing, the reviews and the photos. Websites built inside the listing are closed as well.

The disappearance of questions and answers has a practical consequence: since an algorithm now composes the answer, the only way to influence it is through what it reads — filled-in services, a description, reviews, and an FAQ section on your website.

And a general rule: Google’s interface and rules change several times a year. The source is the help centre at support.google.com/business. Any guide, this one included, is worth checking against it rather than the other way round.

The report is called Performance; the old Insights panel was switched off back in February 2023, and the old screenshots in other guides no longer mean anything.

What you can see: how many times the listing was shown in Search and on Maps, how many people tapped “directions”, “call” and “website”, and which queries people found you by.

What is not there: views of photos and posts — those metrics were removed. And queries with fewer than fifteen impressions are hidden behind “<15”, so the long tail stays invisible to you.

Once a month is enough, and for one conclusion only: which words people actually find you by. They usually differ from the ones you wrote in your services — and then it is the services that should be rewritten to match.

Name, address and phone number must match word for word between the site and the listing, down to how they are written. Google reads discrepancies as two different businesses, and shows both of them worse.

The link to your site inside the listing is worth tagging with a UTM parameter — then your site statistics show how many people came specifically from the listing rather than “from somewhere in Google”. Without the tag those visits blend into ordinary search, and the value of the listing stays unprovable.

What to write on the site itself, what it costs and how to connect analytics: in the guide to a micro-entrepreneur’s website. We will not repeat it here.

Suspension comes in two forms. Partial: the listing is still there and visible to clients, but you have lost control of it — you can neither reply nor correct. Full: the listing has disappeared from Search and Maps.

First rule: do not create a second listing. A duplicate makes things worse and gets in the way of reinstatement.

Then comes the appeal through the reinstatement form, with evidence that the business is real: SIRET, a photo of the sign, a lease or a utility bill at your address, supplier invoices, a licence if the activity requires one. The answer arrives anywhere between a few days and a month.

And most importantly — remove the cause before you file. Bring the name back to the real one, hide the address if you receive nobody, drop categories that do not fit. An appeal filed with the flaw still in place gets refused and costs you time.