Open Google on your phone right now. Type your business name. See what comes up.
If you’re set up properly, you’ll see a panel with your name, address, opening hours, phone number, photos and a star rating.
Tap it and there’s a map, directions, a call button, your website, reviews and posts.
If you’re not, there’s a thin grey line on a map, an address Google’s guessed at, no photos, no hours, and a “claim this business” link nobody from your shop has ever clicked.
That panel is your Google Business Profile, and it’s the most powerful free marketing tool you’ve got.
It decides whether your business shows up on Google Maps when a tourist searches “cafe near me.”
Whether your phone number’s right. Whether the photos people see are ones you chose, or ones a customer took on a bad lighting day three years ago. Whether your address is on the map at all.
It’s free. It takes about an hour to set up properly. And a surprising number of businesses around here haven’t bothered.
I look at Google Business Profiles in Gippsland every week, and the same things come up.
No photos, or one photo from 2017. The wrong category – a restaurant listed as “food shop”, a tradie listed as “general contractor”, a motel listed as just “hotel”.
Empty service lists. Hours nobody updated when winter trading came in. Phone numbers routing to a landline that hasn’t been answered in five years.
Every one of those is a customer slipping through your fingers, and you’ll never know they were there.
Setting it up isn’t complicated.
Sign in with a Google account, verify your business (usually a postcard, sometimes a video call), and put in the same details you’d put on a sign out the front of your shop – except this sign sits in the pocket of every person walking past.
Photos make the biggest difference.
Real ones, taken on a normal day.
The inside, the outside, the food, the staff, the work in progress.
Not stock images. People can smell a stock image, and they scroll past businesses that look fake.
Categories matter almost as much. There’s a primary category and a few extras.
Get the primary one right and you appear in the searches you actually want – “Italian restaurant” instead of just “restaurant”, “panel beater” instead of “auto repair shop”.
The difference in who finds you is night and day.
Once it’s up, post on it. Same way you’d post on Facebook, except this one shows up directly in your Google listing when someone searches your name.
New product, long weekend hours, big news – it all goes in.
The businesses winning at this in Gippsland aren’t outspending anyone.
They’ve just done the free thing properly.
Matt Rowlands runs Your Mate Agency, helping regional businesses get found online. Get in touch at yourmateagency.com.au or 0478 101 521.
