The free thing most SA businesses get wrong

For a local business the Google Business Profile often produces more enquiries than the website, because it is what appears in the map pack when somebody searches with intent nearby. It costs nothing. Most profiles in this country are claimed, half-completed and then abandoned.

The checklist

• Primary category, chosen precisely. "Hair salon" and "beauty salon" surface for different searches. Pick the one matching what you most want to sell, then add secondaries.
• Every service listed, each with a description. This is a text field Google reads and most businesses leave empty.
• Photos, plural, and recent. Interior, exterior, team, work, product. Profiles with real photography get materially more engagement than those with a logo and nothing else.
• Hours, including public holidays. A wrong holiday closure costs you a day of walk-ins and generates a bad review from someone who drove there.
• The website link pointing to a page that answers the search — the treatment or service page, not always the homepage.
• Products or services with prices where you can. Published prices in the profile filter enquiries before they cost you time.
• Posts, roughly weekly. An active profile outranks a dormant one, and it takes two minutes.
• Q&A seeded yourself. You are allowed to ask and answer the obvious questions. If you do not, somebody else will answer them for you.
• Messaging on, if you will actually reply. Enabled and ignored is worse than off.

Reviews are the ranking factor you control

Volume, recency and your responses all matter. The businesses that win the map pack are not the ones with a perfect five stars — they are the ones with a steady flow of recent reviews and an owner who replies to all of them.

The mechanism that works in South Africa is a WhatsApp message after the job with the review link one tap away. Roughly twenty to thirty percent convert when it is that easy, against almost nothing for the same request by email. Do not offer incentives — it violates Google's policy and the reviews get removed.

And do not fabricate them

Fake reviews are a false representation under the Consumer Protection Act, Google actively removes them, and customers detect them faster than most owners expect. Ten real reviews outperform fifty invented ones, because the invented ones read invented.

HelloPeter, too

In several categories South Africans check HelloPeter and an unanswered complaint there ranks for your brand name for years. Monitor it and answer calmly. A well-handled complaint reads better to the next buyer than an unbroken wall of praise.

If the profile is complete and active but does not appear at all — or showed up and then disappeared — the cause is usually one of six specific issues rather than anything in this optimisation checklist. The diagnostics are in the guide to why a business does not appear on Google Maps.