What to put on your Google Business Profile (so your website builds itself)
The seven fields that decide how complete your website looks — and the order to fill them in.
Your profile is the source of the site
If your website is generated from your Google Business Profile, then every gap in the profile is a gap on the site. That sounds obvious, and it still surprises people: a business with three photos gets a site with three photos, and a business that never wrote a description gets a site that has to describe it some other way.
The good news is that the list of things worth filling in is short, and you only have to do it once. Here it is in the order that changes the most.
1. Photos — the single biggest difference
Photos change more about how a site looks than any other field, because they are the only part a visitor judges before reading a word. A profile with a dozen good photographs produces a site with a full-bleed hero and a real gallery. A profile with one produces a site that has to lean on type and colour instead.
Aim for at least three you would be happy to see printed. Photograph the room you actually work in rather than the sign outside, and take them in daylight. Phone cameras are fine — a real photo of your real premises beats a professional shot of somewhere else every time.
2. The description
Google gives you 750 characters and most businesses use none of them. This is the one piece of writing nobody else can do for you, and it becomes the About section on your site.
Write it as if a neighbour asked what you do. Say what you offer, who you tend to serve and anything genuinely unusual about how you work. Skip the adjectives — "premier", "leading", "one-stop" — they say nothing and every competitor uses them too.
3. Services (or menu, or classes)
Services list individually on your site, so the more precisely you name them, the more useful the page is. "Plumbing" is one line. "Emergency leak repair", "boiler servicing" and "bathroom installation" are three, and they match what people actually type into Google.
4. Opening hours
Hours drive more than a table. They tell a visitor whether to call now or later, and they feed the structured data that lets Google show an "Open now" label next to your listing. Fill in special hours for holidays too — an incorrect "open" is worse than no hours at all.
5. Phone number and messaging links
The number on your profile becomes the call button on every page of your site. If you also add a WhatsApp link, that becomes a chat button. On a phone, those two buttons are how most visitors will contact you — the contact form is a distant third.
6. Address and service area
If customers come to you, make sure the address is exact — it feeds the map on your contact page. If you travel to them, set a service area instead. Businesses often write landmarks into the address field ("near the old post office"), which reads fine on Google but confuses anything that tries to place you on a map.
7. Attributes
These are the small facts Google offers as checkboxes: step-free entrance, free parking, card payments, appointment required. They look trivial one at a time, and together they answer most of the questions a visitor would otherwise have to phone to ask.
The order that matters
If you only have twenty minutes: photos first, then the description, then services. Those three carry most of the visible weight. Hours, phone and attributes take five minutes between them and quietly improve everything else.
Everything you add appears on the site the next time it renders. There is nothing to re-upload and nothing to re-type — which is the entire point of building a site this way.