10/30/2026
β : "Checklists are the price of admission, not the contest."
Claiming your Google Business Profile, filling in the hours, adding photos, and collecting reviews gets you onto the map. The three businesses above you did all of that too. What sorts the top three is a short list the checklist skips: the exact categories you chose, the page your profile links to, whether you're open when someone searches, what your newest reviews say, and whether anyone is watching the listing for edits.
The fastest place to start is the field your competitors can't hide: the category printed under their name on Google Maps. Paste this into the AI assistant you already use and fill in the brackets:
Here are the three businesses in the Google Maps results when I search "[your main service] [your city]": [names]. For each one, find the primary category shown under its name on its Google listing and the services it lists. Then compare them with mine (primary category: [yours]; additional categories: [yours]; services: [yours]) and tell me which category or service gaps most likely explain why they're eligible for that search and I'm not, and which changes I can defend as true about my business.
Only add a category you could defend on the phone. "Yes, we do catering" beats eight categories you added for coverage.
Read the guide π https://imforza.link/gbp-guide
Share this with whoever set up your Google profile.