Your Google profile is a storefront. When did you last clean it?

Before most customers ever see your website, they see your Google profile. It sits on the map, under your name, with your hours, your photos and what other people said about you. For a lot of shops it is the front window, and it hasn’t been dusted in years.

What a customer checks in ten seconds

• Are you open right now?
• Does the phone number ring a person, or at least a business that answers?
• Do the photos look like a place they’d walk into?
• When someone left a bad review, did the owner reply like a grown-up?

If any of those answers is “not sure”, the customer taps the next name on the map. They don’t tell you why. You just never hear from them.

The ten-minute clean-up

• Hours, including holiday hours. Wrong hours are the fastest way to lose trust.
• A phone number that is answered, or that texts back when you can’t pick up.
• The right main category, plus the two or three services you most want to sell.
• Five recent, real photos: the outside, the inside, you at work, a finished job.
• A reply to every review from the last few months, good and bad. Short and kind is enough.

Why it matters more this year

It isn’t only people reading your profile now. When someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini for “a good barber near me”, the assistant leans on the same details: your category, your hours, your reviews and how you answer them. A tidy profile makes you easier to recommend, by people and by machines.

Pick one evening this week and do the list above. It costs nothing, and it is the cheapest marketing you will ever do.