HI·06.2 · How to · 7 min
Google Business Profile, done properly
Free, permanent, and it points at your website rather than a platform’s. Most hosts never get round to claiming it. The ones who do own their own name on the map.
Here’s a pattern worth interrupting. A guest spots your property on an OTA, then googles its name to check it’s real. We all do it. If you haven’t claimed your Business Profile, the top results for that search are the OTA listings, so the booking, plus 15%, goes straight back through the platform. With a claimed profile, the same search shows your photos, your reviews, your phone number and your own website, sitting right there beside the OTAs. The search was happening anyway. You’re just deciding who wins it.
Claiming it
- Head to business.google.com and create or claim the listing for your property’s name.
- Verification is usually a postcard sent to the property, occasionally a video. Tedious, I’ll grant you, but you only ever do it once.
- If Google has already auto-generated a listing for your place (it often has), claim that one rather than creating a rival to yourself.
The settings that matter
- Category: “Holiday home”, “Holiday apartment rental”, “Cottage rental”, whichever most specifically and honestly fits. It decides which searches you can appear in, so it’s worth a moment’s thought.
- Website: your own booking site, never the OTA listing. That’s the whole point of the exercise, and it’s the field auto-generated profiles most often get wrong.
- Address vs service area: a hosted property normally shows its address. If the property is also your home and privacy matters to you, take care with this setting, because once an address is published it’s hard to fully retract.
- Photos: upload your best twenty, and use your own rather than the OTA’s watermarked copies. Profiles with strong photos win far more clicks; it’s one of the easiest gains going.
Reviews: the compounding asset
OTA reviews stay locked inside the OTA. Google reviews are yours, they’re public, and they feed your ranking on the map. The routine is pleasingly simple:
- Grab your review link from the profile dashboard (look for “Ask for reviews”).
- Send it after checkout to guests who’ve had a good stay. Direct guests especially, since their booking already lives with you.
- Reply to every review, briefly and warmly. The reply isn’t really for the reviewer; it’s for the next guest reading it.
I’d back ten Google reviews with photos against any social media account you will ever run.
Easy mistakes to trip on
- Claiming the profile, then leaving the OTA link sitting in the website field. Worth checking yours right now; it takes thirty seconds.
- Choosing “Hotel” as the category to seem bigger. It puts you into comparisons you’ll lose and promises facilities you don’t have.
- Stuffing the business name with keywords (“Rose Cottage Best Luxury Dog-Friendly Cottage Cornwall”). Google suspends profiles for this, and getting reinstated is slow and dull.
- Ignoring the Q&A tab. Guests ask about parking and check-in there, and if you don’t answer, either somebody else does or nobody does. Neither is great.
Profile live and pointing at your own site? Guide HI·06.1 covers making that site worth landing on, and HI·06.3 turns the guests it brings you into repeat direct bookings.