Your Google Business Profile does more work than your website for a lot of searches. Someone searches your kind of business near them, they get the map, they pick from the three results in the box. Plenty of them never click through to a website at all.
It’s free, it takes an afternoon to set up properly, and almost nobody finishes it. Here’s the order I’d do it in.
Hours
Wrong hours cost you more than any other single thing on this list, because the person affected was already walking to your door.
Check the obvious one first, then check the ones nobody checks. Public holidays. The week you close between Christmas and New Year. The Monday you stopped opening six months ago. Google will keep telling people you’re open until you tell it otherwise.
If your hours changed during winter and never changed back, that’s the first thing to fix today.
Categories
Your primary category decides which searches you can show up for at all. Get it wrong and the rest of the work doesn’t matter, because you’re not in the running.
Be specific. A Greek taverna is a Greek restaurant, not a restaurant. A sparky who mostly does switchboards is an electrician, and the switchboard work goes in the services list underneath. Pick the closest thing to what you actually do, then add the secondary categories for the rest.
The primary category is the one field where being modest costs you money.
Photos
This is where the shoot pays for itself twice. Profiles with real photos of the actual room get chosen over profiles with a logo and a stock shot, because people are trying to work out what they’re walking into.
Add a few every month rather than dumping forty in one go and never touching it again. A profile that gets updated looks like a business that’s still trading.
Reviews
Reviews are the part people worry about most and act on least. You don’t need a clever tool. You need a habit.
Ask at the moment someone tells you they had a good time. That’s it. A card on the counter, a line in the follow up email, a QR code on the receipt. The businesses that get reviews are the ones that ask, not the ones with the best system.
Then reply to them. All of them, good and bad. A short honest reply to a bad review does more for the next person reading it than the review itself did damage. It shows someone’s home.
Don’t buy reviews. It’s obvious, it gets pulled down, and it puts the whole profile at risk.