Editing and Managing Your Google Business Profile

Keeping your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) information accurate and up to date helps customers and Google alike.

Just like your website, you want to actively manage and optimize your business profile in order to keep your customers informed of any changes or updates to your business. And, to give you the best chance of converting potential customers into leads and ideally lifelong advocates of your business!

Editing Google Business Profile via Google Search and the Google Maps app

There have been recent changes to how Google allows businesses to edit their Google Business Profile (GBP), and there are a number of ways that people have referred to this new way of editing your business listing—from ‘direct edit experience’, to ‘NMX’ (new merchant experience) through to ‘In SERP editing’.  

Whatever you decide to call it – this is how it functions across the following platforms…

Editing your GBP via the SERP on a desktop

The in-SERP editing experience currently looks like this:

We’ll run through what happens in each of these sections below – as well as what’s hiding under the ellipsis (shown above with an arrow).

Edit profile

• About 
• Contact
• Location
• Hours
• Attributes

You can use the tabs across the top, or just scroll down the page to see ALL fields that are updatable:

Read reviews

• Read and respond to reviews

Reviews are ordered by ‘most relevant’ as the default. In this section you’ll be able to view, edit and respond to reviews.

Messages

If you have messaging enabled you can do the following here:

• Respond to messages
• Block users and mark messages as spam
• Change your ‘chat’ settings:

• Turn chat on or off
• Opt to send read receipts
• Set your welcome message
• Add your FAQs

FAQs is where you can set up automated replies to your customers’ most frequently asked questions. So, if someone includes one of these questions in their message to you, they receive an automated message that you have written:

There’s a lot more to Google Business Profile’s messaging system, and it’s always evolving. 

Read our complete guide to Google Business Profile Messaging here.

Add photo

Add photos, add your logo and choose your ‘cover’ photo.

Logo

This surfaces the same ‘upload public photos of…’ box as per the ‘photos’ tab shown above—but this populates the ‘logo’ for your business. 

Your logo is displayed here (see below) in your Business Knowledge Panel, and also in other parts of GBP, such as next to your review responses.

Cover Photo

Again, this surfaces the same ‘upload public photos of…’ box as per the ‘photos’ tab—but this populates the ‘cover photo’ for your business, which may (or may not—such are the whims of Google!) be shown as the primary photo in your Business Knowledge Panel.

You can also upload photos by clicking ‘add photos’ in your Business Knowledge Panel:

Performance

‘Performance’ is the new iteration of what we used to call ‘insights’, including the following metrics:

• Total business profile interactions
• Calls
• Messages
• Bookings
• Directions
• Website clicks
• ‘How people discovered you’
• Searches breakdown

Advertise

This links to Google Ads (quelle surprise)

Edit products

Links back to the editing interface in the old Google dashboard:

You can also click here on the business profile on a desktop to get to the product editing interface:

Edit services

• Edit your services

Don’t forget to check this regularly to see what new services Google is scraping from who knows where.

Booking

If you have online booking tools you can link to them here:

This could be a page on your own website, but it might also be one of Google’s supported scheduling providers.

Q&A

Click to manage your Q&A

Add update

In this instance ‘update’ means ‘Google post’.  Click here to add a new post to your listing:

You can also add ‘updates’ (posts) here on a desktop:

Ask for reviews

You can copy and paste the review link for your review solicitation process.

N.B. You’ll need to be logged into the relevant accounts on your device to share via these other platforms.

The email, Whatsapp, and Facebook links when clicked auto-populate a review request, for example on Whatsapp:

Before using any of these 1:1 messaging options (email, Whatsapp) check if you need express consent before contacting your customers in any of these ways.

Did you know? You can also use BrightLocal’s free Google Review Link & Place ID Generator to generate this link—the tool is a lot easier to bookmark, and it’s much quicker to use when you need to generate review links for multiple clients and locations.

What’s under the ellipsis in the top right corner?

In the ellipsis section you’ll find:

• ‘Business profile settings’ which includes managers, messaging (chat and FAQ additions), notifications, and advanced settings (business profile ID, Google assistant calls, option to show or not show your phone number, business labels, shop code, and Google Ads phone number for location extension ads)
• ‘Notifications’ – select which types of email alerts you’d like to receive
• ‘Add a new business profile’ – takes you to https://business.google.com/create
• ‘Your business profiles’ – takes you to a pop-out window showing all of the businesses that you manage.  Click on the link to ‘manage multiple profiles’ to take you to https://business.google.com/locations
• ‘Help and support’, ‘send feedback’, and ‘terms of service’ are all the same as in the ellipsis when viewed in Google Maps on a mobile device as per the above.

Google CTA carousel

Whether you’re updating via Google maps, in the SERP on a mobile or on a desktop – you’ll find a carousel of related Google CTAs, such as:

• Complete your profile
• Add photos
• Get custom email
• Add update
• Get more reviews
• Create an offer
• Claim your credit
• Set up booking

It’s worth keeping an eye on these notifications and CTAs from Google to give you an insight into which parts of your profile might need some attention, and also to gain an idea of which features of GBP and related Google services Google is looking to promote or increase uptake of.

Editing GBP via the Google Maps app

If you’re using the Google Maps app, you simply click on your profile image in the top right of the screen, select ‘your business profiles’ and then select the business you want to update:

Once you’ve done this, you’ll see the business listing displayed as usual, with the following section at the top.  

Your editing options are organized under these three labels:

• Edit profile
• Promote
• Customers

Plus you’ll find a number of options underneath the vertical ellipsis:

These settings are as follows:

• ‘Business profile settings’ which includes user management, messaging (chat and FAQ additions), notifications, and advanced settings (business profile ID, Google assistant calls, option to show or not show your phone number, business labels, shop code, and Google Ads phone number for location extension ads)
• ‘Edit business information’ – this links through to the standard editing dash we’ve gotten used to on a mobile device with tabbed options for about, contact, location, hours and more
• ‘Add photos and videos’ – add photos and videos to the profile

The other labels are specific to your personal maps profile rather than functionalities for editing your business profile.

Editing GBP via bulk edit

You can access bulk editing functionality via the GBP dashboard (business.google.com).  To use bulk edit your business profiles will need to be in a location group and they’ll each need to have unique store codes.  Bulk edit allows you to upload your updates via a file.  So much easier when you’re updating 100s (or even 10s) of locations at a time!

Read our guide to multi-location editing here.

Managing Google reviews in bulk

Even if you no longer have access to the ‘old dashboard’ and it instead redirects you at business level to the in-SERP editing experience all is not lost.

You can currently manage ALL reviews for ALL of the businesses you manage in the dashboard at:

https://business.google.com/reviews

Here you can choose which locations reviews you’d like to see – just choose the location group and you’ll see all reviews from all business listings in that location group:

If you’d like to ONLY see reviews that need a reply then click here on the listing in question:

Google will then open (as a new tab) the OLD dashboard for that business, where you can select reviews according to the following:

Editing via the SERP on a mobile device

This looks and functions very similarly to the Google maps app, apart from the vertical ellipsis which looks like this:

These settings are as follows:

• ‘Business Profile settings’ including managers (add and remove managers), advanced settings (business profile id, accept Google Assistant calls, show or don’t show your phone number, labels, shops code, and Google Ads phone number), remove business profile (stop managing this profile, mark this business as closed, ‘remove profile content and managers’ – more on this below…)
• ‘Notifications’ (choose which email address to use and which email notifications you’d like to receive from Google re GBP)
• ‘Add a new business profile’ (links to https://business.google.com/create)
• ‘Your business profiles’ (lists the GBP profiles to which you have access)
• ‘Tutorial’ (quick carousel run-through of the direct edit experience)
• ‘Help and support’ (links to https://support.google.com/business/answer/7039811)
• ‘Send feedback’ (opens a form where you can report an issue or suggest an idea and attach a screenshot)
• ‘Terms of Service’ (links to https://support.google.com/business/answer/9292476)

Editing via the Google Business Profile Dashboard

In some cases, the Google Business Profile Manager editing experience can be accessed by visiting business.google.com, which will take you to your business listing dashboard. 

At the time of updating this article, November 2022, this is in the process of being phased out by Google, which prefers you to edit via Search or Google Maps.

If you can edit your listing in the old dashboard (https://business.google.com/locations), you’ll be able to click through on one of the listings and remain in the dashboard rather than being redirected to the SERP.  You’ll be able to use these labels to manage your business:

For some time now, visitors to Google Business Profile Manager have been urged by Google to ‘edit business info directly on Google Search’:

This is where we find ourselves now – with most business listings that are not using bulk updates only editable via Search and the Google Maps app.

Remove profile content and managers – proceed with caution!

This section allows you to basically remove your business profile (read what Google says about this here: https://support.google.com/business/answer/4669092) as far as possible.  

You can also export the contents of the Google Business Profile to Google Takeout:

Once you’ve done this you’ll be able to access various elements of your Google Business Profile, downloadable in zipped folders (this was added in Dec 2022):

Roundup

Editing your business profile via Google Search and/or Google Maps looks set to replace the previous ‘Google Business Profile’ dashboard option of managing and editing your business for smaller businesses. This guide runs through the current direct edit interface and how businesses can use it to complete the most popular and common tasks for businesses.

It’s worth noting that many aspects of the Google Business Profile dashboard have not yet been duplicated via Search or the Google Maps app, including managing Google’s free business websites, for example. Only time will tell whether this will happen, but in the meantime, I hope you’ve now got a good understanding of how best to access various Google Business Profile edit and management functions.

Up next:

Editing Google Business Profiles for Multi-location Businesses

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