When somebody in Kathmandu searches for a service near them, the first thing Google shows is not a website. It is a map with three businesses on it. Those three listings absorb an enormous share of the clicks, and getting into them costs nothing but attention. Yet in nearly every audit we run, the client Google Business Profile is missing hours, has no photos from this year, has two duplicate listings competing with each other, and has unanswered reviews sitting on it.
Claim It, and Find the Duplicates
Your business may already have a listing you never created, generated from other data sources or added by a customer. Search for your business name and address before you create anything. If a listing exists, claim it rather than making a second one. Duplicates are actively harmful: they split your reviews, confuse Google about which is authoritative, and often carry an old phone number that is still ringing somewhere. If you find duplicates, report them for removal and consolidate onto one.
The Category Is the Single Highest-Leverage Field
Your primary category tells Google what searches you are eligible to appear in. Get it wrong and everything else is wasted effort. Be specific: Software Company and Website Designer surface for different queries. Add secondary categories for genuine additional services, but do not stuff the list with categories you do not actually serve, because it dilutes relevance for the one that matters. Look at what the businesses already ranking in your area use, and be at least as specific.
NAP Consistency Is Not a Formality
Name, Address, Phone. These three must be identical everywhere they appear: your profile, your website footer, your Facebook page, every directory you are listed in. One spelling of your street in one place and a different spelling in another is enough to weaken the signal that these all describe the same business. Pick one exact format and propagate it. Then put the same details in your website structured data so Google can match them without guessing.
Hours, Including the Ones You Are Closed
Fill in your real hours, and set special hours for public holidays. Nepal has a lot of them. A customer who travels to a closed shop because your profile said open leaves a one-star review, and that review outlives the mistake by years. This is the cheapest possible way to avoid a bad rating.
Photos Are a Freshness Signal
Profiles with recent, real photographs get more engagement, and engagement feeds back into visibility. Not stock images. Your actual premises, your actual team, your actual work. Add a few every month rather than thirty once and then nothing for two years. Geotagging is not necessary and is not the ranking factor people claim it is; recency and authenticity are.
Reviews: Ask, and Always Reply
Review count and recency both matter, which means a steady trickle beats a burst. Build the ask into your delivery process: at the moment a customer is happiest, send them the direct review link. Never buy reviews, and never incentivise them; both are detectable and the penalty is worse than the problem. Reply to every review, including the bad ones, in public and without defensiveness. Prospective customers read the replies more carefully than the reviews, because the replies tell them how you behave when something goes wrong.
Use Posts, Products and Q&A
Most profiles never touch these. Posts let you put an offer or an update directly on your listing. The Products or Services section lets you list what you sell with descriptions, which gives Google more text to match queries against. The questions section will get questions whether you monitor it or not, and an unanswered question sitting on your listing for a year is a worse look than no question at all. You are also allowed to seed it with genuine frequently-asked questions and answer them yourself.
Then Connect It to the Website
The profile does not work in isolation. It should point at a page that actually matches it, with the same address in the structured data, a real embedded map, and content about the area you serve. Google is looking for corroboration between the listing and the site. When those two agree, and the same details appear consistently across the rest of the web, you have built the strongest local signal available to you, and you have not spent anything on ads to do it.