Google Business Profile: 9 steps to manage your listing

A customer is about a 5-minute walk from your shop, types exactly what you sell plus "near me", and Google sends them somewhere else. Frustrating, right? And not because the other place is better, but because their profile gives Google enough information to feel confident sending customers there. Doanh nghiệp của tôi is the familiar Vietnamese name for Google My Business, the tool for managing how a business appears on Google Search and Google Maps. It has been renamed Google Business Profile and moved to a new place to manage it. The name changed but its role got heavier: for customers within a few kilometers, this profile is your number one storefront, ahead of your website. This article walks through all 9 steps to manage it properly, about a 10-minute read, along with the mistakes that send customers astray that we run into all the time when verifying and optimizing profiles for clients. If your location has few reviews so far, you can use Google Maps review services The contact page should be clear, easy to use and display well on every device. That raises your chance of closing customers and shows professionalism.

What is Doanh nghiệp của tôi, and where does it live now?

Doanh nghiệp của tôi, originally Google My Business, is a free profile where a business lists its name, address, opening hours, phone number and photos, and receives reviews on Google. Since late 2021 Google has renamed it Google Business Profile, and it has since dropped the standalone management app altogether: you edit your profile right in search results or on Google Maps. Sign in with the right admin account, type your business name, and you see the dashboard in under a minute.

Something worth noticing: years after the rename, keyword tools still record over 10 thousand searches a month for "doanh nghiệp của tôi" under the old name, and quite a few of you assumed the tool had been shut down and abandoned your profile. When nobody looks after a profile, Google takes information from other sources and from strangers who suggest edits. In other words, your storefront is being painted by passersby. That sounds wrong already.

Your Google profile is the face customers see first, the website comes after

Look back at your own behavior and you will see it right away: when you need a restaurant, a clinic, a repair shop, you type the service plus an area, and the biggest thing that appears is the map pack with 3 profiles and their star ratings. Most clicks stop right there: tap to call, tap for directions, no need to visit the website. For this "need it now, nearby" group of customers, the Google profile is the first homepage.

On that profile, customers see everything that drives their behavior within about 10 seconds: average star rating, number of reviews, real photos, opening hours, price level, and even the owner's replies to complaints. We often tell our clients: the website is where you tell the full story, the Google profile is the first handshake. Miss the handshake and that is it.

Why can't nearby customers find you?

The three causes we see most when clients bring us a profile to examine:

• The profile is unverified or ownership is lost. Someone created it for you long ago, the person holding the account has left, and now nobody can edit it. Google barely shows an unverified profile in full, and getting access back goes through an owner recovery process that takes from a few days to a few weeks.
• Duplicate profiles. A single shop has 2 or 3 profiles at once, each with a different phone number and reviews split every which way. Google does not know which to trust, so it lowers its trust in the whole cluster.
• Inconsistent information across places. The address on the profile differs from the website and the fanpage, and the hours are not updated for holidays. A customer arrives to find it closed, leaves 1 star, and the spiral begins.

All three problems are fixable, but problem number one is the biggest headache because it involves Google's verification process. This is also the part we handle end to end as a service: Google Maps verification and putting your business address on Maps correctly from the start, so you avoid untangling it later.

Google ranks local results on exactly 3 things

Google states publicly in its official documentation: local results are ranked by relevance, distance and prominence. In business terms:

• Relevance: the more accurately and completely your profile covers your trade, services and description, the more easily it matches what customers type. Choosing the right primary category matters more than stuffing keywords into the name.
• Distance: Distance: this part cannot be bought, but declaring the right coordinates and service area means you are not unfairly penalized.
• Prominence: Google looks at how well known you are overall, including the number and quality of reviews, how often you are mentioned on the web, and even the quality local SEO of the accompanying website.

These three factors explain why a tiny shop can outrank a 20-branch chain within its radius: the first two can be tuned right in the profile, and after tuning you usually see movement within 2 to 4 weeks, while prominence is built gradually through real reviews. The local game is far fairer than the national one. Keep at it and you rise.

Nine steps to manage your Google Business Profile properly

This is the backbone of the article, as promised in the title. Nine steps, done in order, each one finished before moving to the next:

1. Bring control under one roof: find out who currently owns the profile, revoke access from former staff, and add at least 2 admins so you do not get stuck when 1 person leaves.
2. Verify ownership: complete verification the way Google requires, which is now commonly a video of the actual business premises.
3. Clean up duplicates: find every profile with the same name and address, request a merge or removal, and keep just one main profile.
4. Fill in consistent core information: name, address and phone number must match the website and other places character for character, with the best possible primary category.
5. Add selling details: opening hours including holiday hours, service area, services and a price list if your industry allows, and attributes such as parking and delivery.
6. Upload real photos on a rhythm: storefront, interior, products, team; add new photos a few times a month rather than dumping a batch and walking away.
7. Run your reviews: ask for a review after every good service, reply to praise and complaints within 1 to 2 days, and never buy fake reviews, because the penalty of having them all removed is real.
8. Post updates: promotions, new items and holiday closures right on the profile, so Google and customers both see that the profile is alive.
9. Measure every month: open the performance section to see calls, direction requests and website clicks, compare this month with last, and only then decide what to tune next.

All 9 steps cost Google nothing; what they eat is the consistency of one person with clear responsibility, spending about 30 minutes a week to keep the profile alive. A profile abandoned for 6 months is obvious at a glance. Customers can tell too.

NAP, reviews and photos: the trio that must be consistent

People in the trade call name, address and phone number the NAP set, and the rule is a single word: match. If the profile says "Đường Nguyễn Văn A" but the website says "Ng. Văn A" and the fanpage lists a different hotline, Google has to guess, and when machines guess, sometimes they guess wrong. Go through every place the business appears, including auto-generated directory pages, and match each character to the main profile. It takes about 2 hours and saves a lot of machine guessing.

Reviews are the heaviest part of prominence, and the easiest to get wrong. From our experience advising service clients: ask for real ones, reply for real within 2 days, and answer even 1-star reviews properly, because that reply is written for the hundreds of people who will read it later, not just the person who complained. As for photos, favor real photos with context. Google can tell stock photos from real ones, and customers tell faster than machines. Fake photos lose real customers.

Profile chat has ended: steer customers to the 3 remaining routes

Google has discontinued direct messaging on profiles since mid-2024, so stop counting on that for your contact button. The three remaining routes must work smoothly: a call button that gets answered within about 30 seconds during working hours, a website link pointing to the exact service page being searched rather than a generic homepage, and a private messaging channel such as WhatsApp or Zalo added as a link in the profile information.

A small tip that makes a big difference: attach a tracking code to the website link on the profile, so you know how many people the Google profile sends to your site each month. Without measurement, every debate over whether Maps brings customers is just arguing by feeling. Data ends the argument.

Read the performance numbers and tune by industry

The performance section of the profile gives 4 numbers worth checking once a month: impressions by the keywords customers type, calls, direction requests and website clicks. Read them in pairs to make sense of them: lots of impressions but few calls means the profile is seen but not convincing enough, usually because of old photos or a low star rating; a sharp drop in impressions versus last month means you should check whether someone has suggested a bad edit to your information.

Each industry has its own dial: restaurants live on dish photos and exact hours for every holiday, clinics live on reviews and the Q&A section, on-site services such as plumbing and electrical should declare a service area instead of a fixed address, and retailers should post products with prices directly on the profile. If you run a multi-location chain, give each location its own profile with the same declaration standard, and do not merge them into one master profile for management convenience and lose all the customers searching by area. One profile per location.

Your Google profile is the front door, your website is your home

To be fair, so you do not put all your eggs in one basket: the Google profile sits on Google's land. Display rules change whenever Google decides, as with the chat shutdown above, and you do not own any of the customer data on the profile. What you truly own is the website with your own domain, where customers book, leave their phone number and read your full story. The most durable structure for local customers is a Google profile that catches the "need it now" customer, a website SEO-ready that keeps the "researching carefully" customer, the two linking to each other, with one NAP set.

MONA has been doing this whole package for over 10 years: SEO Google Maps, putting profiles into the map pack, full-scope SEO and website design for over 14,000 projects since 2016. If you want to know where your profile has gaps, call 1900 636 648 or to book a free profile review: we go through exactly the 9 steps in this article, point out which step you are failing, give you the order to fix things in, and tell you in advance which ones you can do yourself without hiring anyone. After the review, you are welcome to take the list and do it yourself, that is fine by us. A storefront should have its lights on.