Somebody in Bedford needs a plumber, a hairdresser, a garage or a web designer. They pick up a phone and type the thing plus the town. What comes back is not one list. It is two, stacked on top of each other, and they are won in completely different ways.
At the top is a map with three businesses under it. That is the map pack, and it is drawn from Google Business Profiles. Below it is the ordinary run of blue links, drawn from websites. Most small businesses are competing hard in one of those and are not present in the other at all, usually without ever having realised there were two.
Wins the map pack
Google Business Profile
- Free, and can be live in an afternoon
- Ranked largely on how close you are, how relevant you look, and how prominent you are
- Prominence is mostly reviews: how many, how recent, and whether you reply to them
- Puts your number, hours and photographs directly into the results
- Somebody can ring you without ever seeing a website
- You do not own it. It can be suspended, and the rules change without asking you
Wins the decision
Your website
- Ranked largely on relevance, links from other sites, and age
- The only place you control the whole story, in your words, at full length
- Where somebody checks you are real, competent, and worth the money
- Answers what a profile has no room for: how it works, what it costs, what happens next
- Slower. A new site on a competitive local term is a six to twelve month job, not a six week one
- Yours. It cannot be suspended and it does not change under you overnight
The profile gets you seen, the site gets you chosen
Watch what somebody actually does and the division of labour is obvious. They search, they glance at the three in the map pack, and they open two of them. They look at the photographs, they read the worst review rather than the best one, and then, if they are about to spend real money, they click through to the website.
That is the moment the profile hands over. A profile can say you exist, that you are nearby, and that other people rated you. It cannot say how you work, what you charge, what happens after they call, or why you are the right choice for their particular job. That is a website, and no amount of profile polish substitutes for it.
The reverse is just as true, and web designers are much worse at admitting it. A beautiful website nobody reaches is a brochure in a drawer. If you are a local business with no profile, you are invisible in the half of the page most people look at first, and that is not a design problem.
If you can only do one thing this month
Do the profile, then go and get reviews. Not because it matters more, but because it is faster, it is free, and the result arrives in weeks rather than in quarters.
- Claim and verify the profile. It costs nothing and takes an afternoon.
- Choose the primary category carefully. It is the single biggest relevance lever and most people pick it in about four seconds.
- Put real photographs on it. Your work, your premises, you. Not stock, and not text baked into an image, which Google will take down.
- Get reviews, then keep getting them. Recency counts, so five spread across a year beats twenty from 2023.
- Reply to every review, including the bad one. Especially the bad one, because that reply is written for everybody who reads it afterwards rather than for the person who left it.
- Keep the opening hours right, bank holidays included. Wrong hours produce the one complaint that is entirely your own fault.
What a website does that a profile cannot
Three things, and all three are about the enquiry you never hear about.
The first is answering the awkward questions before somebody has to ask them out loud. What does this roughly cost. Do you cover my village. Do I have to be in. A profile has nowhere to put any of that, so the nervous enquirer, who is a large share of them, quietly rules you out instead of asking.
The second is the longer searches. Nobody types plumber Bedford when they are actually stuck. They type why does my boiler keep losing pressure, or how much does it cost to move a radiator. Those are answered by pages, not by profiles, and the person asking is usually much closer to spending money than the person browsing a map.
The third is that it is yours. A profile sits on somebody else’s platform, under rules you did not agree to and cannot appeal quickly. Businesses do get suspended, sometimes for something as ordinary as putting a keyword in the business name. If your entire presence is a profile, a bad week at Google becomes a bad quarter for you.
What we tell clients
Do both, in that order, and stop thinking of them as separate jobs. They feed each other: the site is what the profile links to, the site is where the longer searches land, and the reviews on the profile are the proof the site is quietly leaning on.
We are going through exactly this ourselves at the moment, which is a fair test of the advice. Our profile went up before our own site was finished, and the slow part has not been the website. It is asking clients for reviews and then waiting for them to land: unglamorous, free, and worth more than anything we could add to a page.