Outsourcing your Google Business Profile: updated every week.
A profile that stands still for a year slips behind businesses that work on theirs every week. We take over the upkeep: posting updates, adding photos, keeping the details accurate and replying to reviews. You get a report on what has happened and what the profile is doing, and you keep the keys to your own profile.
What a profile is judged on, and how much weight each part carries
Our own local check adds up nine parts to a hundred. Listed out, those nine read as nine equal points. On a scale to twenty you can see that the profile itself and the map pack together make up half the scorecard, and that photos and reviews together weigh less than those two.
Google Business Profile20
Local map pack20
Opening hours10
Photos10
Rating10
Number of reviews10
Website linked10
Phone number5
Replying to reviews5
scale01020points
Nine parts, a hundred points together. The two striped bars are the parts the free check cannot always see; whatever cannot be measured is also left out of the denominator in the result, so you never lose points for something nobody has looked at. What exactly is not measured is set out in FIG.03. The check itself sits at the local visibility checker NL.
What we do to a profile every week
The work is small and it needs to happen often. That is exactly why it always ends up at the bottom of a business owner's list, and exactly why outsourcing it simply pays off here.
Add a post
- Add a post. A job you did this week, an offer, a changed opening time around a public holiday. Short, with a photo and a clear call to action.
- Add a photo. Of your own work, not from a stock library. Interior, exterior, team and work, so the profile looks different in three months than it does today.
- Check the details. Opening hours, services, area, phone number and the link to your site. This is the dull part, and it is the part that carries the most weight.
- Replying to reviews. To the good ones and the bad ones, in your tone and with your agreement on the line we follow.
Once a month we go through the wider figures
That is the monthly check in Search Console on impressions and crawl errors, the same as in our ongoing client agreements, plus the question of whether the picture is changing. It is not a weekly task, because at that level a week shows you nothing yet.
What happens to a profile in a month
Four actions against four weeks. Three of them happen every week and the fourth once a month. This is the rhythm as it is set out in a current client proposal; it is not a frequency we invented here for the diagram.
actionweek 1week 2week 3week 4
Three actions every week, one a month. The point of the diagram is the bottom row: checking the figures feels like the most important job, but it is the only one you do not need to do more often. The three rows above it are what keeps a profile alive, and they are short tasks; the hard part is not the time but that they come round every week.
What happens when nobody keeps it up to date
A profile that stands still is not removed. It just slowly slips behind the businesses that do work on theirs, and you notice it through fewer enquiries without anything actually breaking. What exactly happens in the weeks that nothing happens, we have written up separately on the page about thirty days of silence on your profile.
The two things that go wrong fastest are opening hours around public holidays and a phone number left over from an old situation
Both cost you a customer straight away, and both are fixed in two minutes by someone who checks in every week.
Without a UTM you do not know which enquiry came from Maps
The link from your profile to your site is a bare link by default. If someone clicks it and then fills in your form, your statistics will simply say a visitor came from a search engine. You will not see that they came in through your profile, so you will not know whether the work on the profile is paying off.
A UTM solves that: a few extra characters added to the link that tell you where the visitor came from
We add these to the website link, to the buttons and to the links in your posts, each with its own name, so your statistics show the profile as a source and you can see separately whether a post is working.
It is a five minute job that you only need to do once, and without it any claim about the return on profile management is just a guess. If you also run Google Ads, this belongs to the same measurement layer; how you measure conversions in Ads is covered on measuring conversions in Google Ads as a tradesperson NL.
Reviews are part of it, replying sits inside the reputation service
Two of the nine parts on the scorecard are about reviews: how many you have and how you score. A third, replying, carries five points. Within profile management we include the replying, because that belongs to keeping a profile up to date.
Building up more reviews is a different trade and has its own service
What is and is not allowed when asking for reviews, and the best moment to ask, is covered in the guide on getting more Google reviews NL. If you want us to reply on behalf of your business and put a plan behind it, that is improving your online reputation NL. We are not putting a second reputation page next to that one.
What you can keep doing yourself
Not everything needs to be outsourced. Writing posts works perfectly well yourself, and we have a free tool for it: the AI Google Business Profile post generator NL writes a post based on your trade and what you offer. Anyone who does that every week does not need to pay us for it.
Replying to reviews is also something you can do yourself, and a free reply generator NL is ready for that
And you can measure your own standing with the local visibility checker NL, which uses the same scorecard as FIG.01 above.
What remains as a reason to outsource it is not that it is difficult, but that it has to happen every week
Anyone who keeps it up for three weeks and then skips a month is worse off after six months than someone who never started and simply had it done for them. Whatever you do yourself, the main thing is being able to keep it up. How to check the settings yourself is covered on what you can set up yourself on your Business Profile.
Two of the nine parts we cannot see automatically
The two striped bars from FIG.01, with the reason alongside them. They are here because a scorecard that hides its gaps gives too high a mark, and because a score nobody can check for themselves is a sales figure, not a measurement.
Whatever cannot be measured is left out of the denominator. That is a choice built into the code, not a rounding error: otherwise everyone who runs the free check would automatically lose 25 points for two things nobody has looked at. The result therefore lists those two separately, with the reason alongside them.
What it costs
The pricing page NL does not currently show a separate line for profile management, and we are not putting a figure here that is not there. The part that does exist is below.
For the businesses we do this for today, the profile work runs alongside a monthly agreement that also covers the site and visibility
In one ongoing agreement, website, SEO and Google Ads together come to €650 a month excluding VAT, and the weekly upkeep of the Business Profile is included in that. That is an existing agreement, not a standard package. How a combined monthly agreement is put together, and who does which part of it, is covered on the page about the strategy programme in which the site, visibility and advertising are managed together NL.
If you only want to take on the profile management, we agree that in the call
Loose hours are billed at €65 an hour; that rate does appear on the pricing page. As soon as there is a fixed monthly amount for this service, it will appear there and here at the same time.
What you never pay for: the check that shows where you stand, the generator for your posts and the generator for your review replies
Those three are free and will stay that way.
Questions business owners ask
If I outsource it, does the profile become yours?
No. The profile stays yours and sits on your own account. We come in as manager, and you can withdraw that access in two clicks if you want to stop.
How much time does it still cost me?
Supplying photos of your own work, and agreeing the line we take when replying to reviews. The first of those is the only real effort, and it is also the part that makes a profile distinctive.
Will this get my business into the map pack?
We cannot promise that. Where you land in the map pack also depends on your distance from the searcher and on what else sits nearby, and nobody has a dial for that. What we can do: put the seven parts you can actually control in order, and keep them there.
What is the difference with the free check?
The check measures a single moment and gives you a list of what is missing. Outsourcing is working through that list every week and then keeping the profile up to date afterwards. Start with the check; without that result you will not know whether outsourcing pays off for you.
Do you have experience with this?
Yes. Weekly posts and updates on the Business Profile are part of ongoing client agreements, and we have built our own tools for it: the local check, the post generator and the reply generator for reviews.
I have several locations. Is that possible?
Yes, but then it is agreed per location, because every location has its own profile, its own opening hours and its own reviews. This takes more work, and you should know that upfront.
Start by measuring where you stand now
The first step costs nothing and takes half a minute: the local visibility checker NL looks up your profile and works through the parts from FIG.01. You get a score along with what is missing for each part, plus the two parts that could not be measured.