The Ultimate Guide to Dominating Google Business Profile by Dennis Yu - HTML preview

How to Mark a Business or Location

‘Temporarily Closed’

If you need to close seasonally or temporarily, mark your business as temporarily closed.

Doing this ensures customers are up-to-date without affecting your local search ranking.

How to mark your business as temporarily closed:

1. Sign in to your Google Business Profile.

2. Click Info in the left menu.

3. Look for “Close this business” in the Google section on the right.

4. Click Mark as temporarily closed.

To set special hours for holidays or other circumstances, click Info in the left menu,

then Special Hours.

How To Customize Your GBP Profile

Most GBP profiles look awful because business owners don’t really pay attention.

We’ll go through the general steps of customizing a GBP profile, and then we’ll actually take a profile apart section by section.

As said previously, a GBP listing is like a mini-website.

A website without new content is not going to drive much traffic, so you need to post regularly in GBP if you want to get ahead.

Regularly is at least once a week. Anything lower than that is not a good sign.

Why once a week? Because that’s how long it takes for the posts to disappear. So if you post something now, it will last for exactly one week.

What Should I Post on GBP?

A lot of photos.

And when we say a lot, we mean dozens of pictures each week if you can.

It might sound kind of crazy, but the more you post, the better your profile will be. If you don’t know what kind of photos to upload, it doesn’t really matter.

Photos of your staff, of the food, of customers (with approval), of the location, of events happening in your store or office.

Videos too — people love to see video content!

And while you’re taking these photos and videos, encourage people to leave reviews. Of course, don’t cheat and say, ‘We’ll give you a free dessert if you leave a review,’ because Google will catch you.

Some people stack their own reviews or post fake one-star reviews against competitors — and they always get caught.

Even if it doesn’t happen in the short term, eventually the platforms will catch up — or your competitors might notice and tell on you.

When that happens, you risk losing all your reviews — even the good ones — and getting suspended.

Be more visible. A lot of people don’t show up because they don’t have any content in their GBP.

One common mistake is thinking GBP competes with their website — that’s why they don’t use it.

Think about it as your GBP actually giving you the opportunity to have two or three racehorses in the same race. You’re giving yourself a better chance to win and become visible to customers — where they’re looking.

The key is just to make sure that everything is back on your site. So on your business profile, make sure you have your website link there.

If you're doing posts in your business profile, make sure all of that links back to your site. If you use the free website — which I highly encourage — treat it like a landing page filled with Google juice and point it to a specific page on your site.

Don't make the mistake of sending it to your homepage. That's what a lot of people do. That’s a big mistake people make — not just in their business profile, but also in Google Ads, where they send users to the homepage and try to show everything.

But it's really more important to build your credibility and take them where you told them you're going to take them and once they are in, now you earn the right to bring them to the other pages that you want to show them.

Already set up your GBP? See 15 Key Reasons Why Your GMB Listing Isn’t Ranking] for

deeper optimization tips.