We hear it constantly from small business owners: “We need to fix our website.” And maybe that is true. But here is what we have watched happen for years — businesses pour money into a website redesign while completely ignoring the one place Google actually shows people first.
Your Google Business Profile is what most potential customers see before they ever click through to your site. It shows up in local search results, in Google Maps, and in that information panel on the right side of the screen when someone searches your business name. It tells people your hours, your phone number, your reviews, and whether you are open right now. If any of that information is wrong or missing, you are losing business. Quietly, invisibly, every day.
Dr. Melody White has been doing IT consulting since 1996, and she will tell you that one of the most consistent problems she sees across small businesses and nonprofits is a Google Business Profile that was claimed once, set up halfway, and then forgotten. Hours that changed after the pandemic and never got updated. A phone number that goes to a line nobody checks. Photos from eight years ago. No responses to reviews, good or bad.
Google pays attention to all of this. The algorithm uses your profile activity as a signal of whether your business is legitimate and active. A neglected profile does not just look bad to humans — it actually ranks lower in local search results. That means your competitor down the street, who posts an update once a week and responds to every review, shows up above you even if your business has been around longer and has more to offer.
The review piece deserves more attention than it usually gets. Most business owners know reviews matter. What they do not always know is that responding to reviews — including the negative ones — is a ranking factor. Google wants to see that a real person is managing this profile. When you reply to a review, even just to say thank you, you are signaling to Google that your listing is active and managed. That adds up over time.
There is also a feature most businesses never touch: Google Posts. You can publish updates, offers, events, and announcements directly to your profile, and they appear in search results. It is free, it is relatively quick, and almost nobody in the small business space is doing it consistently. That is an easy advantage to take.
Here is what you can do today: search your own business name on Google and look at what comes up. Are your hours correct? Is the phone number right? Does the address match where you actually are? Look at your reviews and check whether any have gone unanswered. That audit takes fifteen minutes and will tell you exactly how much ground you may have been giving away without realizing it.
At On Your Side Technologies, we often start local visibility conversations with this exact exercise because the findings are almost always surprising. If you want help getting your profile cleaned up and working for you instead of against you, that is a straightforward thing we can work through together. Sometimes the biggest wins are the ones hiding in plain sight.
Want to talk it through? We keep a few virtual coffee spots open each month — grab one while they’re available: Book a virtual coffee with Dr. White
Photo by Jonas Leupe on Unsplash
