The Free Marketing Tool You're Probably Ignoring Your Google Business Profile

Have you ever Googled your own property name and actually looked at what comes up?

Because what appears in those first few seconds, before a potential guest has clicked a single link, can make the difference between someone booking with you and someone scrolling straight past.

And for most short-term rental owners, what comes up is a Google Business Profile that was set up once, never touched again, and is quietly doing far less work than it should be.

In this solo episode, Sarah makes the case for why your Google Business Profile is one of the highest-leverage, lowest-cost visibility tools available to you as a location-based business and walks through exactly what to do with it.

The episode covers how Google decides which businesses to show (relevance, distance and prominence and why prominence is the factor you can actually influence), what Google is doing behind the scenes with your profile that most hosts don’t know about (including the fact that Google can and does update your information, whether you want it to or not!), and why this matters more than ever now that AI Overviews are pulling content directly from Business Profiles to answer guest questions before they’ve even visited your website.

The practical section works through four layers of a well-optimised profile: the essential information (the stuff most people have, often partially or incorrectly), visual content (photos that work harder than a stock image ever will), reviews (how to ask for them, how to respond, and why the responses matter as much as the reviews themselves) and Google Posts (the feature almost nobody uses, that keeps your profile active and feeds Google’s algorithm exactly what it needs).

If you’ve been treating your Google Business Profile as a set-and-forget listing, this episode will change that and it won’t take more than 15 to 20 minutes a month to stay on top of once you’ve got it right.

Key Takeaways

Google ranks Business Profiles on three factors: relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance and distance you can influence at setup; prominence: built through reviews, activity and consistency: is what separates the profiles that appear from the ones that don’t.Google can change your profile information without asking you. It pulls data from third-party sources and may update your hours, address or other details based on what it finds elsewhere online. Check your profile regularly and correct anything that’s drifted.AI Overviews are now pulling content directly from