Create a Google Business Profile: a step-by-step guide
From Google account to verified listing: what you need, how verification works, and the name mistake that gets profiles suspended.
A Google Business Profile is the listing that appears beside the search results and in Google Maps when somebody looks your company up. This guide walks the whole route: what you need beforehand, how to create the profile, how verification works, and the point at which profiles routinely get suspended.
If your profile is already running and you want to sharpen it, the ten-point optimisation checklist is the text you want. This one is about getting started.
Before you start
You need a Google account. Use one that belongs to the company rather than a personal one, or access will later hang on a single individual.
Your business also has to meet one of two conditions. Google puts it like this: either there is a location customers can visit, or you travel to your customers. A PO box is not enough, and a rented mailing address where nobody actually works is explicitly not eligible.
Check whether your profile already exists first. Simply search for your company name plus the town. Many listings are generated automatically from other sources, in which case you do not create a new one, you claim the existing one.
Location or service area
You make this choice while creating the profile, and it decides what customers see later.
If you have a shop, a practice or an office with a sign on the door, you enter the address and show it.
If you travel to your customers, you are a service-area business. Google allows exactly one profile for that, and you should hide the address. For the area itself Google gives a rule of thumb: normally it should not extend farther than about two hours of driving from where the business is based, though larger areas can be appropriate for some businesses.
The combination works too. A garage with its own workshop plus a mobile service may show the address and set a service area alongside it.
One exception is worth knowing: businesses selling age-restricted products such as alcohol, cannabis or weapons are not permitted as service-area businesses without a storefront.
The name, and why profiles get suspended over it
This is where most profiles come unstuck, for a well-meant reason: the urge to put search terms in the name.
Google's rule is short. The name has to be the real-world one, the one on the building, on the website and on your invoices, and the one customers know you by.
According to Google, the following do not belong in the name:
- Marketing taglines. "TD Bank, America's Most Convenient Bank" becomes simply "TD Bank".
- Location information that is not part of the real name. "Equinox near SOHO" becomes "Equinox SOHO".
- Service or product information. "Verizon Wireless 4G LTE" becomes "Verizon Wireless".
- Store codes, the ® symbol, all-caps words, opening hours, phone numbers and web addresses.
Google adds that unnecessary information in the business name is not permitted and could result in the suspension of your profile. A name like "Painter Smith Facade Painting Bristol" falls squarely into that category.
For accuracy, one caveat: Google's guidelines never use the word keywords here. They forbid service, product and location information. In practice that is the same problem, but it pays to read the rule as written.
Categories
The category tells Google what your business is. Google's own guidance here is pleasantly concrete.
Use as few categories as it takes to describe your core business, and choose them as specifically as possible. The test Google suggests: the category must complete the sentence "this business is a ...", not "this business has a ...". A hotel with a restaurant is a hotel, not a restaurant.
Google fills in the more general categories itself behind the scenes. Choose "golf resort" and you are implicitly carried under resort, hotel and golf course as well.
What Google does not say in these guidelines: how many categories are allowed at most, and what exactly a primary category does. Both are widely asserted online. Neither appears in Google's own documentation, so treat statements about them as experience rather than rule.
Verification
Without verification the profile is not public. Google offers several routes: phone or text, email, a live video call, and the classic postcard.
Important and often misunderstood: you cannot pick the method. Google determines it automatically, based on business type, publicly available information, region and opening hours. In some cases Google asks for more than one method.
Where video verification is available, Google explicitly recommends it. It is not possible for every business, though, and only works within your opening hours.
A few postcard rules are where verifications come apart:
- It is not available for every business.
- Most codes arrive within 14 days, according to Google. No guaranteed maximum is given.
- The code is five digits and expires after 30 days.
- While you wait, do not change your name, address or category. If you do, the code stops working.
- Requesting a new code invalidates the one already in the post. That tends to lengthen the process rather than shorten it.
Once you enter the code, Google reviews the listing again. That review takes up to five business days according to Google, and on rare occasions longer. Sometimes it is instant, for example when the company website is already confirmed through Search Console.
Afterwards
A question everyone answers and Google itself does not: how long until the profile shows up in Search and Maps. There is no figure for it in Google's documentation. What is there is the postcard delivery expectation and the review time, and those are two different things. So treat claims like "you are live within three days" as an estimate.
Keep to the basic rule as well: one profile per business. Duplicate listings make your details display inconsistently across Search and Maps. Exceptions exist for individual practitioners and for departments, and businesses sharing a building, a restaurant inside a hotel for instance, each get their own profile.
Once the profile stands, the fine-tuning starts. Which fields pay off most after that is covered in the ten-point checklist.
Common questions
Do I need a storefront? No. A business that travels to its customers gets a service-area profile and hides the address. A PO box or rented address with no actual operation is not enough.
My business is already on Google and I never did anything. That is common, because Google also builds listings from other sources. In that case you do not create a new profile, you claim the existing one and verify it.
Can I change the verification method? No. Google determines the available methods automatically and they cannot be changed.
Can I put my town in the name? Only if it genuinely belongs to the company name. An addition made purely for search falls under the prohibited location information and can lead to suspension.
Sources
Every rule in this text comes from Google's own documentation, read on 22 October 2026:
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