The tattoo shop where my wife works moved around the corner recently. New address, same business. My first job as the SEO in the house was telling her to go update the address everywhere on the web, because otherwise Google would see two versions of the same shop and trust neither. I thought of that the whole time I was talking to Mike Martin, founder of GBPly, on Unscripted SEO. His word for it is mirroring, and he thinks it matters more than almost anything else you do for a Google Business Profile.
One business, one entity
Mike’s rule is that your profile, your website and your citations all carry the same business information. Not just name, address and phone. Hours, categories, services, prices, all of it. “Google’s the hottest girl at the party. And if your website and your Google profile don’t match, then all of a sudden you’re in a position where Google is just going to walk away.”
He even flips the usual order. Most business owners start by claiming the profile and fighting verification. Mike builds the website first, then the citations, then makes the profile match, and only then verifies. If you’ve ever lost a week to a verification loop with no explanation, that order alone is worth trying.
The address question I keep getting
I’ve had service area clients get nowhere on Maps, then rent a small office near the center of town, put up a sign, verify it and finally show up. Mike agreed that’s allowed, as long as the office is staffed. What isn’t allowed is a home-based service business showing its home address to rank better. That breaks Google’s rules for service area businesses, and Mike pointed out the real-world cost: someone asks Maps for directions, ends up on a street full of houses and gets angry at Google.
If you’re a plumber, roofer or tree service working from home, hide the address and verify as a service area business. Show them the van, the tools and a utility bill. That’s it.
Profiles don’t have an end date
Here’s the part I’d hand to any business owner. Mike runs every profile on what he calls the GBP loop: keep the profile complete and mirrored, add current pictures, publish posts that inform or build a relationship, and get and answer reviews. Then next month, do it again. He says that alone beats “95%, if not more” of the profiles out there, because hardly anyone keeps going after the first optimization.
His picture of why it works stuck with me. If the shop across the street has blacked-out windows but a line out the door every day, you assume it’s busy. If the line stops, you assume it closed. Google reads your profile the same way.
If you want software to keep that loop running, Mike built GBPly for agencies, with a free Google Maps rank tracker that gives you 10 scans a month. (Referral link; I may earn a commission.)
Where I’d start with your profile
If you asked me to look at your local presence tomorrow, this is the order I’d take from Mike’s playbook:
- Compare your profile line by line against your website. Fix every mismatch.
- Find your 10 to 15 most important citations and make sure you can log in and edit each one.
- If you have doctors, lawyers, dentists or other professionals people ask for by name, look at independent practitioner profiles. Mike has seen a physio clinic go from one profile to six.
- Put the loop on a calendar. Pictures, posts and review replies, every month.
None of that is a trick. Mike spent years on tricks, running about 3,000 lead-gen sites, and walked away from them because the leads kept falling while the rankings held. What he does now is boring and consistent, and that’s why it lasts.
Watch the full interview on YouTube or read the complete recap in the Mike Martin episode of Unscripted SEO. Find Mike at mikemartin.uk. And if you want a second set of eyes on your own profile, here’s how I work.