Most agencies treat a Google Business Profile like a website launch: optimize it once, send the report, move on. Mike Martin, founder of GBPly, says that’s exactly why most profiles lose. “It doesn’t have an end date.” On Unscripted SEO he walked through the system his software runs for agencies, and why he’d rather you verify last, keep your citations few and editable, and run the same four steps every month. Here are the plays, written so you can run them on a client profile this week.
1. Build the website and citations before you verify
Mike doesn’t start with verification. Google pulls business information from user input, from the owner and from verifiable sources across the web, so you give it those sources first.
- Set up the website.
- Set up the citations, and make every one match the website.
- Make the Google Business Profile match both: name, address, hours, categories, services and prices. Not just NAP.
- Then go for verification.
Mike says that in some cases Google will use the website and citations to verify the profile, which makes the whole step a lot easier.
2. Get the business type right before you show an address
Storefront, service area business or hybrid. Mike sees experts get this wrong. A service area business that shows its address is breaking Google’s guidelines for representing your business, and if you show an address you need a commercial premises customers visit, with signage. A plumber set up correctly as a service area business verifies by video in a few minutes: the signwritten van, the tools, the invoice book, a utility bill.
3. Run the GBP loop every month
Mike’s loop is profile completeness and mirroring, pictures, posts and praise, “times consistency.”
- Pictures don’t affect ranking, but they “put a face on the business as it is today.”
- Posts inform, build a relationship or convert a prospect. Keyword-stuffed posts “don’t even get indexed.”
- Praise is reviews plus a response to every one of them.
At month end, check the profile still mirrors the website and citations, and start again. Mike says staying on that wheel beats “95%, if not more” of profiles, because almost nobody stays consistent. If you’d rather not run the wheel by hand, that’s what GBPly automates: the client drops content into a portal and it flows into a publishing schedule. (Referral link; I may earn a commission.)
4. Keep 10 to 15 citations you can actually edit
Mike avoids mass citation tools. His test is whether you can edit every listing easily after it’s built, because un-mirrored data hurts more than missing data. He says Google’s documentation now allows it to apply a suggested change to your profile within four days if you don’t respond and the citations back the change up. If someone changes the phone number across your citations, they can change your profile too.
My own approach starts with the business data aggregators, then works down the list by hand. You’ll find the full process in our guide to building local citations. Either way, quality and control beat volume.
5. Set up independent practitioner profiles
This is the play Mike says has almost doubled some of his agencies. Google allows a profile for each client-facing professional available at the premises during working hours, and it names lawyers, dentists and doctors.
- List every practitioner a customer can call and ask for by name.
- Give each one a page on the site (/lawyer-one, /lawyer-two).
- Create a practitioner profile for each, linked to their own page. The organization’s profile links to the homepage.
- For someone who works at several locations, create one profile per location with that location’s hours.
A 15-lawyer firm ends up with 16 profiles. A physio clinic Mike worked with went from one to six.
6. Launch a new location in the right order
Every location’s profile is independent, so treat each one as its own launch. If the business can serve the new market as a service area business, it doesn’t need a storefront or signage. If it needs a shop, Mike’s order is website, citations, profile, then staff, so you’re not paying wages before leads arrive. His coaching business went from a new profile to number one in a 2.5 mile radius at four weeks and 25 miles at 12 weeks for “business coaching” and “business coaching near me.”
7. Let AI draft posts, but have a human approve them
GBPly lets you write posts with AI, but each one is checked, edited and approved by a person before it goes out. Mike’s rules: no AI-generated images (Google asks for real pictures of the business), and write so “a 10 year old could understand it.” He also warns against using Gemini for GBP questions. His team found it gets Google’s own documentation wrong and doubles down, while Claude and the newest ChatGPT models are far more accurate.
One more thing to keep in mind while you measure all this: Search Console hides a lot of the queries behind your clicks. Our dark clicks study found that across 38 sites and about 4 million clicks, the average site had 64% of its clicks with no query attached.
Watch the full interview on YouTube or read the full recap in the Mike Martin episode of Unscripted SEO, including his move from 3,000 lead-gen sites to Google Business Profiles. Find Mike at mikemartin.uk and on LinkedIn.