Google Business Profile: the free 20 minutes most SA businesses skip

Someone three suburbs away is standing in their kitchen right now, typing "biltong near me" or "best koeksisters in Centurion" into Google. They're going to buy from whoever shows up first. The uncomfortable part? Whether that's you has very little to do with how good your product is — and almost everything to do with a free listing most business owners have never properly set up.

That listing is your Google Business Profile. It's the box that appears on the right of a search, the pin on Google Maps, the thing that shows your hours, photos, reviews and a "Call" button before anyone has even visited your website. And for a food or FMCG brand selling locally, it is quietly one of the highest-return things you own.

Why it matters more than your website

Your website is where people go once they already know you exist. Your Google Business Profile is how they find out you exist in the first place. When somebody searches with intent — "near me", a suburb name, a product — Google leans heavily on these profiles to decide the top three results, the ones that get the overwhelming majority of clicks. No profile, or a half-finished one, and you simply aren't in that race. It doesn't matter that your sauce is better.

Setting it up properly

Go to google.com/business and either claim your existing listing or create a new one. Google will verify you're real, usually by post, phone or video. Then — and this is the part people skip — actually finish it:

• Category first. Pick the most specific primary category you can ("Biltong shop", not "Shop"). This single field does a lot of the heavy lifting for what searches you appear in.
• Real photos, plenty of them. The product, the storefront, the team, the packaging. Profiles with photos get meaningfully more clicks and calls than bare ones. Phone photos in good light are completely fine.
• Hours that are actually correct. Including public holidays. Nothing loses a customer faster than a wasted trip to a closed shop — and Google notices the complaints.
• Products and a short, honest description. List what you sell with prices where it makes sense. This is free shelf space.

The mistake nearly everyone makes

They set it up once, feel productive, and never touch it again. A profile that hasn't posted, replied or added a photo in eight months tells Google the business might be dormant — and Google would rather show an active competitor. Treat it like a shopfront window, not a filing cabinet. A photo or short update every week or two, replies to reviews as they land, and your visibility compounds quietly in the background.

Honestly, who needs to bother

If you sell to people in a place — a deli, a bakery, a butchery, a brand stocked at a local market — this is close to non-negotiable, and it's free. If you're purely a national online brand with no physical presence and no local pickup, the payoff is smaller and your energy is better spent elsewhere. For most South African food and FMCG owners, though, it sits firmly in the "twenty minutes that keeps paying you back" column.