Stuffing keywords into the business name
The most common violation in this state, and the one people are proudest of. "Anchorage Plumbing and Heating Repair 24/7 Emergency" is not a business name. It is a name plus an ad.
Google's guidelines are not ambiguous about this. The name must be the one on your signage and your stationery. Marketing taglines, hours, phone numbers, URLs, service descriptions and location additions are all prohibited. Google's own example is that "Regal Pizzeria Open 24 hours" is unacceptable and only "Regal Pizzeria" is allowed.
It sometimes works for a while. Then a competitor reports it, and Google reserves the right to suspend profiles that violate the guidelines. Ranking third with a profile is better than ranking nowhere without one.
Showing a home address when you go to the customer
If you drive to your customers rather than the other way around, you are a service-area business, and Google says directly: "If you're a service-area business, you should hide your business address from customers."
Plenty of Alaska trades run out of a house in Eagle River or a shop off Old Seward with no customer-facing entrance. Publishing that address does two bad things at once. It invites a suspension for an address that fails a verification check, and it drops your pin at your kitchen table instead of across the area you actually cover.
Set the service areas instead. Hide the address. Your rankings will be based on the areas you declared and the searcher's location, which is what you wanted anyway.
Hours that stop being true in September
This is the specifically Alaskan one. Tourism here is compressed into a window most of the country does not appreciate: 2,702,900 visitors between May and September 2024, against 376,300 across the entire October to April winter, according to the visitor volume report McKinley Research Group prepares for the Alaska Travel Industry Association.
So a lot of profiles are accurate for four months and fiction for eight. Somebody drives to your door in October because Google said open until 7. They leave a one-star review, and they are right to.
Use the seasonal hours settings, mark the closure, and put the reopening date in the description. More on running a seasonal site properly in the off-season post.
The wrong primary category
Your primary category does more for what you rank for than any other single field, and most people pick it in four seconds during setup and never revisit it.
Pick the one that matches what you most want to be found for, not the one that describes the widest range of what you do. A contractor who mostly does roofs should be a roofing contractor, not a general contractor, even though both are true. Add the rest as secondary categories.
Check what the top three results in your area chose. That is free competitive intelligence and it takes two minutes.
A profile nobody can actually reach
Google's eligibility rules expect a business to be contactable at the verified location during the hours it states. For co-working arrangements it goes further and expects clear signage, customers received during business hours, and the space staffed by your own people.
The mailbox-store address and the virtual office both fail this. They also fail it in a way that is easy for a competitor to photograph and report.
Photos from 2019
A profile with four photos from three years ago reads as a business that might be closed. Photos are also one of the few things on a profile that a person actually looks at before deciding to call.
Shoot the exterior so somebody can recognize it from the road in the dark, which in this state is most of the day for half the year. Shoot the team. Shoot the work. Ten decent phone photos beat two professional ones.
A website link pointing at a redirect
Two versions of this. The small one: your link goes to the version of your domain that redirects to the other version. It still works, it just adds a hop and a little ambiguity about which address is canonical. Pick the one your site actually serves and use it.
The bigger one: every service you offer points at your homepage. Google Business Profile lets you attach a link to individual services and to appointment booking. Point each one at the page about that thing. A visitor who lands on a page answering the exact question they searched converts far better than one dropped on a homepage to find it themselves.
What to do this week
- Open your profile and read the business name out loud. If it contains anything other than your name, fix it today.
- If you travel to customers, hide the address and set service areas.
- Check the primary category against the top three competitors in your area.
- Set the seasonal hours now, before the season ends and you forget.
- Add ten photos taken this month.
- Repoint the service links at the matching pages on your site.
None of that costs money. All of it beats buying citations.