I went looking for a Google Business Profile checklist worth handing to a client and read a stack of them, including a long AI-generated one that looked complete. It told me to turn on messaging. Google removed messaging on July 31, 2024. It told me to seed the Q&A section with common questions. Google started phasing out Q&A in December 2025. It had the phone number setup backwards and a video limit Google's own uploader stopped enforcing a while ago.

None of that advice was lying. It was just old, and a checklist never tells you which items have expired. So here is mine. Every claim in it was checked against Google's own documentation and my own client work on a single date, August 31, 2026, the items most likely to expire carry that date inline, and the dead items are listed as dead. When something below stops being true, this page gets corrected, and the correction gets logged the same way I log everything else in the measurement stack.

The two things no checklist can give you

Before the list, two facts that checklists skip because you cannot buy them with effort.

Proximity decides as much as anything you will type into the dashboard. Where your business sits relative to the searcher is a giant ranking input and it is not editable. If a competitor is closer to downtown, some of the map pack is simply theirs. Knowing this saves you from blaming your description for a distance problem.

The business name field is the ugliest lever in local search. Keywords in your business name help rankings. Search any city for an emergency plumber and count the listings with a keyword salad in the name field that were registered as something shorter. Google's rules say the profile must use your real-world name, and keyword stuffing the field risks suspension. Some businesses respond by legally renaming themselves to include the keyword, signage and website and all of it rather than just the paperwork, which is compliant and works and tells you something bleak about the incentive design. I do not do this for clients. You should at least know the lever exists, because your competitors do.

Setup and identity

Claim the profile at business.google.com and verify it. Expect video verification: Google will want footage proving the location and equipment are real. Have signage and proof ready. (Checked 31 Aug 2026.)
Remove or merge duplicate listings. Two profiles split your reviews and confuse the map.
Give teammates their own owner or manager access. One shared login is how profiles get lost when someone leaves.
Use your real-world business name. See above for what the grey version of this looks like and what it risks.
Pick the correct primary category. This is the biggest ranking input you can actually edit. Secondary categories cover everything else you legitimately do.
Address: accurate, or hidden with a service area. If customers do not visit you, hide the address and set a service area. Set the area to towns you actually serve, not the maximum radius. Mine is hidden; I run a service-area profile for my own practice and work Pittsburgh and the counties around it.
Phone: if you use call tracking, the tracked number goes in the PRIMARY slot. The primary number is the one Google displays and dials, so a tracking number anywhere else tracks nothing. Your real local number goes in the additional slot, which keeps it associated with your business for consistency across the web. Several older checklists have these two backwards. (Practitioner convention documented by CallTrackingMetrics and Sterling Sky; checked 31 Aug 2026.)
Website link: point it at the most specific page that fits. A location page beats the homepage if you have one.
Hours, holiday hours, opening date, and every attribute that applies. Wheelchair access, payment types, women-owned, all of it. Empty attribute fields are unanswered questions.

Content

Description: what you do and where, in the first sentence. Write it for a person; the machines read the same sentence.
Services and products, each with a description and a price where you can. Real prices beat "contact for quote" for the same reason this site publishes its own numbers: people trust what you are willing to say out loud.
Photos: 10 to 20 real ones. Exterior, interior, the work itself, before and after. Add more monthly. Skip stock photos; buyers can tell, and so can Google's image systems.
Videos: Google's docs still say 30 seconds, and the upload tool does not enforce it. The constraint that bites is the 75MB file cap, not the stopwatch. A 60 to 90 second walkthrough fits fine if you compress it. (Google's written limit vs the tool's behavior, both checked 31 Aug 2026.)
Posts: weekly if you can manage it. Updates, offers, events. This is a maintenance heartbeat more than a growth engine.

Reviews

Build one consistent way of asking. Save your review short link and make asking part of finishing every job.
Respond to every review, and treat speed as part of the product. Within 48 hours at the outside. The response is customer service performed in public, and the next customer is the actual audience.
Do not stuff keywords into your responses. I have never seen a case study or a ranking-factors survey that credits keywords in the owner's replies, and the incentive argument fails too: replies are the single easiest field for an owner to spam, which is exactly why a ranking system should not listen to them. The review signals with survey support are about the reviews themselves. Write your replies like a person.
Flag fake reviews, and document them if Google does not act. Screenshots with dates. Boring, occasionally decisive.

Dead in 2026: stop configuring these

Messaging and chat: removed July 31, 2024. Google shut off Business Profile chat and the call history log, citing low usage. Any checklist telling you to "turn on messaging" was written before the toggle disappeared, and any argument about response-time strategy for it is an argument about a feature that no longer exists. What still works: the call button, the website link, and booking links for appointment businesses. (Google's own notice; checked 31 Aug 2026.)
Q&A: phasing out since December 2025. The API was discontinued on November 3, 2025 and the public section began disappearing a month later. You cannot seed it with your common questions anymore. Its replacement matters more than its death: Google now generates answers about your business from your profile fields and your reviews. The move that replaces Q&A seeding is filling every profile field with the actual answer, because that is the text the machine quotes. That is answer engine optimization applied to a map listing, and it is the same work I describe everywhere else on this site. (Checked 31 Aug 2026.)

Maintenance

Match your name, address, and phone exactly across your website, Yelp, Facebook, and the major directories. When your own surfaces disagree, the profile that agrees with itself wins.
Add LocalBusiness schema to your website. Tell the machines the same facts your profile claims.
Check the performance report monthly. Calls, direction requests, website clicks, and the search queries people used. The queries are the part most owners never read and the part that tells you what Google thinks you are.
Watch for edits you did not make. Google and the public can both change your listing without asking. A quarterly full re-audit catches what the monthly glance misses.

Why this page has dates on it

Two of the items above were features that no longer exist, and they were being recommended this week by checklists that outrank this one. The difference between advice and noise is whether anyone went back to check. Every claim here was verified against Google's documentation or my own client work on August 31, 2026. When one expires, I will correct it here and say so.

I sell this work, including local SEO by the hour, so weigh my incentives the way you would weigh anyone's. That is also exactly why the dead features are listed as dead: you should get the expiration dates from the person selling the checklist.

The Ultimate Google Business Profile Checklist, Fact-Checked