In one sentence: A Google Business Profile is the free listing a business claims and manages at Google, holding the name, category, address or service area, hours, photos, and reviews that Google shows in Search and on Maps.
Your website is yours. You pay for the domain, the hosting, and the pages, and you decide what goes on them. The profile is a different animal. It is a record about your business kept by Google, and you get to edit it once you have proven the business is yours, which is what verification is for.
What lives on it is the practical stuff a stranger needs: what the business is called, what it does, where it is or which towns it drives to, when it is open, how to reach you, what the work looks like, and what customers have said. Two things tend to surprise owners. Other people can suggest changes to the listing, and details you set once go stale on their own as holiday hours pass, a number changes, or you drop a service you no longer offer.
The listing also carries the parts you did not write. Reviews land on it, questions get asked and sometimes answered by strangers, and customers add their own photos. That mix is the point. The profile is meant to read as what the public knows about you, not as an ad you wrote about yourself.
It is not a website replacement either. A profile can tell someone you install shower doors and that you close at five. It cannot answer the questions that come next, show the work in detail, or take the request while you are up on a ladder.
For most local service businesses this record is the first thing a stranger reads about the company, and it is what gets ranked in the map results, so an out of date category or a wrong closing time quietly turns paying customers into somebody else's paying customers. It costs nothing to own and a few minutes a month to keep straight, which makes neglecting it an expensive habit. What that upkeep actually involves is laid out on our Google Business Profile page.
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