Open Google on your phone and search for your property’s name. Look at the panel that comes up with your photos, your opening hours and your reviews. That is your Google Business Profile.
Google says these profiles appear in Maps and Search when someone looks up a business or place near them. So before a guest reaches your website, they may well have read your profile. It is worth knowing what it says.
Four checks, about twenty minutes
- Hours. Check your main hours are right. Then check your special hours. Google’s help page says you can set special hours for holidays or other temporary periods. Christmas and New Year are the obvious ones. If reception closes early or opens late, set it now, not on the day.
- Photos. Look at the first photo a guest sees and ask if it is the one you would choose. Google’s photo guidelines ask for JPG or PNG files between 10 KB and 5 MB, in focus, well lit and without heavy filters. It says your newest uploads appear first, so one fresh batch of the pool, the rooms and the view changes what people see. Add a photo of the outside too. Google notes an exterior photo helps customers recognise your place when they arrive.
- Review replies. Read your last ten reviews and look for any with no reply from you. Google says replies are posted publicly and the reviewer is notified. Reply to the ones you missed this week. Keep each short, use the guest’s name and answer what they actually said.
- Website address. Tap the website link on your profile from your phone. Does it land on a page where a guest can see rates and book, or on a home page with a menu to dig through? If you can, tag that address the way we describe in our post on the direct bookings your analytics never shows you. If your booking engine reports sources, visits from your profile then show up as their own line.
What a profile will not do
It points a guest at you. It does not take the booking. Perfect hours and fresh photos still lose the guest if the next step takes ten taps on a phone, which is why we wrote about counting the taps it takes to book you.
What this is one piece of
Cleaning up your profile is one fix, and it is worth doing whoever looks after your marketing. The setup is the easy half. Hours change and reviews arrive most weeks, so a profile needs looking at again and again. The same goes for the website it links to and the booking engine behind it. Ongoing work like that is what Boost Direct is built for. It is our fully managed marketing for accommodation providers: website, SEO, paid advertising on Google and Meta, social media and ongoing support from a team that keeps optimising, on a flat fee or a performance-based model. If you would rather keep this in your own hands, this post and the ones after it are written for you too. The rest of what we do is on our services page.
Search your property name tonight and read what comes up.
Want to know what’s costing you direct bookings?
Summer starts on 1 December, under three weeks away, and whatever your profile and website say now is what the first holiday searches will find. We’ll audit your website, Google listing, reviews and prices against Booking.com, free. You’ll have it in writing within 2 business days.
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