Top 5 Tips for Optimising Your Google Business Profile for Local SEO (2026)

Most Google Business Profile advice is a checklist that has barely changed since 2019: verify your listing, add photos, post weekly, tick the boxes. The problem is that controlled testing has since shown some of that advice does nothing at all. Here are the five tips we would stand behind in 2026, including one that most guides get backwards.

1. Stop wasting effort on posts and geotagged photos

The most valuable optimisation is reclaiming the hours you spend on tactics that do not work. Sterling Sky ran a nine-week controlled study tracking 441 keywords and found zero ranking movement from Google Business Profile posts. Posts still have a job, since an active profile converts better and gives searchers something current to look at, but as a ranking tactic they are a dead end. Photo geotagging is worse than a dead end, it is a myth: Google strips EXIF metadata, including GPS coordinates, from every image at upload, and a separate Sterling Sky test across 27 locations confirmed no ranking effect. Reallocate that time to the four tips below.

2. Get your primary category ruthlessly right

Your primary category remains the strongest relevance signal on the entire profile, and it is the one field where "close enough" costs real visibility. A firm categorised as "Accountant" when the searches it wants are for "Tax consultant" is invisible for the queries that matter, regardless of how complete the rest of the listing is. Set the primary category to the single service that drives revenue, use secondary categories for genuine supporting services only, and then mirror the same language in your services list. Google matches these fields against real query wording, so pull the phrasing from what customers actually type, not from your internal jargon. Revisit this quarterly, since Google adds and retires categories constantly.

3. Do keywords in customer reviews actually help?

Yes, with an honest caveat. LocalSEOGuide's ranking factors study found that the percentage of a business's reviews containing the searched keyword, and the percentage mentioning the city, correlated strongly with local rankings. Review text also now surfaces inside AI results, where answers sometimes quote customer reviews word for word. The caveat is that review volume and velocity remain the bigger levers, and keyword-rich reviews usually arrive alongside more reviews generally, which makes the keyword effect hard to isolate. Treat specificity as a multiplier on a healthy review flow, not a substitute for one.

We see the difference on our own profile. A five-star review with no text still helps our rating, but it gives Google, and every AI system reading it, nothing to index. The review next to it mentions the exact services delivered, and that one earns its keep twice.

How you get specific reviews matters legally as well as ethically. Never dictate wording and never incentivise, which breaches Google policy and, in the UK, falls foul of the CMA's fake reviews regime. Instead, ask a question at the point of request: "which service did we help you with?" draws out the specifics naturally.

4. Reply to every review, and echo the keywords back

This is the tip most guides get backwards. They treat replies as customer service and review content as the SEO asset, when the reply is the only review text you fully control, and Google indexes it. Google's own local ranking guidance explicitly lists responding to reviews as a factor, a status almost nothing else in local SEO enjoys. The bar is remarkably low: average response rates across industries sit under 50%, so simply covering every review puts you ahead of most of your market. A 2025 GatherUp analysis found businesses responding to 80% or more of reviews saw an average 12% lift in local pack visibility within 90 days, and replying within 24 hours amplifies the signal.

The technique is to restate, naturally, the service and location the reviewer raised. When a client of ours mentioned our complimentary audit and their six-month SEO strategy in a review, our reply thanked them and referenced both, once each. The reviewer's words and ours now reinforce the same service terms on the same listing, without a single stuffed keyword.

One 2026 warning: Google now offers AI-generated review replies inside the profile. A templated, copy-paste reply reads as hollow to customers and adds nothing distinctive for Google to index. Thirty seconds of human writing beats it every time.

5. Make your profile AI-ready

Local discovery is shifting from keyword searches to conversational questions. Google's Ask Maps lets users query Gemini with requests like "quiet coffee shop good for working", and your business surfaces only if your categories, attributes, services and reviews give the AI enough to match against. There is a defensive reason to care too: where a profile is incomplete, Google now generates the missing details itself, pulling from your website and reviews. A well-maintained profile means the AI describes you accurately; a neglected one means it guesses. In 2026, completeness determines whether the machines summarising local search represent your business correctly, or at all.

The priority order

If you do these in sequence, it looks like this: fix the category, build steady review velocity and ask the questions that make reviews specific, reply to every single one within a day echoing the language back, and keep the profile complete enough for AI to read you right. Everything else is maintenance.

Who are we, and what right do we have to tell you about SEO?

Fair question. Wolfstone Digital SEO is a B2B SEO and GEO agency built by practitioners who rank their own properties before advising anyone else, including a finance comparison platform grown to DR 67 with more than 1,600 citations across AI search platforms. Our positioning is deliberately narrow: if you want a new logo, some posters and an email campaign, there are plenty of agencies better placed to help. If you want more leads and more sales, that is the job. Everything above has been tested on profiles we own or manage.

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