Your Google Business Profile: your business's silent salesperson

Before pushing open the door of your business, a customer almost always does the same thing: they type your name into Google, or they search for “florist” or “restaurant” near them. What they see at that precise moment decides whether they come or move on to the next one. It is neither your shop window nor your website, it is your Google Business Profile. And most of the time, it works against you without you knowing it.

The good news is that this profile is free and that a few hours of work are enough to transform it.

A customer decides in ten seconds

Put yourself in their shoes. On their phone, they see three things: your rating out of five, your main photo, and whether you are open right now. If the rating is low, if the photo is blurry or dates from four years ago, if the opening hours shown are wrong, they will not dig deeper. They will go to the competitor whose profile looks alive.

It is frustrating, because this customer is not judging your work. They are judging the only thing they have in front of them.

Photos do 80% of the work

This is the point where the gap between businesses widens the most. A profile with three hastily taken photos makes nobody want to come. A profile with fifteen sharp, bright photos immediately inspires confidence.

What you need to cover:

• The shopfront, taken from the front and in daylight, so that people recognise you from the pavement.
• The interior, to reassure people about the atmosphere and make them want to go in.
• Your products or your work, in close-up, well lit.
• You and your team. Photos of faces are the ones that generate the most clicks, because they humanise the business.

A simple tip: take your photos in natural light, early in the morning or late in the afternoon, and clean up the frame before pressing the shutter. Retouching afterwards, to rebalance the light and the colours, takes a decent photo to a professional level. Then add two or three photos a month, Google rewards profiles that are active.

A description written for your customers, not for you

Many descriptions look like an extract from a company’s articles of association. Nobody reads them.

Instead, write what a customer wants to know: what you sell, what sets you apart, where you are, and why they should come to you rather than somewhere else. Use the words your customers actually use when they search, not your trade jargon. And check that your main category is the right one, it is what determines which searches you appear in. It is a setting many business owners have never opened, and it changes everything.

Reviews: ask for them, and reply to all of them

A business with 40 reviews and a rating of 4.3 inspires more confidence than a business with 5 reviews and a perfect 5.0. Volume reassures as much as the rating.

The only reliable way to get them is to ask for them. When a customer leaves happy, just say so, or hand them a small card with a QR code leading to your profile. Many people gladly accept, they just do not think of it on their own.

And reply to every review, including the negative ones. A calm, polite reply to an unhappy customer is read by dozens of future customers. It often says more about your professionalism than ten glowing reviews.

The details people forget that bring customers in

These are the most profitable five minutes of your month:

• Special opening hours: public holidays, time off, one-off closures. A customer standing in front of a closed door does not come back.
• The phone number and the link to your website, up to date.
• Attributes: access, payments accepted, delivery, terrace. They appear in search filters.
• Google posts, to announce something new or an offer. They are displayed directly on your profile.

Where to start

Open your profile today and look at it the way a stranger would. You will immediately see what is missing. Fix the opening hours and the category first, then tackle the photos, that is where most of it is decided.

If photos are precisely your weak point, or if you have neither the time nor the equipment to do them properly, that is our trade. Agence PowerCom takes care of your photo shoots, your retouching and the complete setup of your profile, so that this silent salesperson finally works for you.