Google Business Profile management The profile is the shopfront.

No. A business that travels to its customers can hide the street address and list the areas it covers instead, up to twenty of them under Google's rules. What you cannot do is list an address you do not work from — that is the sort of detail that gets a profile suspended.

You do. We ask for manager access, which you can revoke at any time, and ownership stays with the business. If a former web developer or a departed staff member currently holds it, recovering that is one of the first things we do. It happens more often than owners expect.

The profile itself is fixed inside the first fortnight — categories, services, hours, links and photos are a matter of doing the work rather than waiting for it. The effect takes longer, because people find the profile at the pace they were always going to search. We read it against where the profile started, not against a number we promised you.

More than most people assume. It is the line the profile leads with, and it decides which service and attribute fields Google offers you. Changing it can trigger re-verification, so it is a decision to make once, deliberately, rather than a setting to experiment with.

Often, and the process is unglamorous. We work out what triggered it — usually an address that cannot be verified, a category that does not match the business, or a burst of edits made too quickly — correct it, file the reinstatement, and answer whatever Google asks for. It can take weeks, and the outcome is Google's decision rather than ours.

Anybody can suggest an edit — hours, category, phone number, even the address — and some go live without you being asked. Most are harmless corrections from members of the public. A few are not. The defence is attention: somebody checking on a schedule and reverting what should never have changed.

They are not a shortcut and we would not sell them as one. What they do is put something current in front of the person choosing between you and the next listing. A profile whose most recent activity was two years ago tells that person something, and it is not flattering.

Fewer and better, on a schedule, beats a hundred uploaded once. The team, the vans, the premises and genuine finished work, going up on a rhythm. The count matters far less than whether the newest photo shows the business as it is now.

Twelve profiles. Google's guidelines allow one per real location, so each branch gets its own categories, services, hours and photos of that actual site. The discipline is the hard part: without one person responsible for the set, a group's profiles drift apart and half end up carrying the head-office number.

Yes. A profile can be suspended, merged or edited by somebody else; a website you own cannot. And the profile is deliberately shallow, so anybody wanting detail, pricing or a form still needs somewhere to go. What is true is that a large share of people never get that far.

It depends on how many profiles there are, what state they are in, and whether an ownership recovery or a reinstatement is involved. A single well-kept profile and a twelve-branch group with duplicates in it are not the same job, so the fee scales with the work. It is quoted after the audit, and the first call costs nothing.

No long-term lock-in, and the terms go in front of you in plain English first. Reporting lands on a fixed date whether the news is good or not: what changed on the profile and when, and the profile's own views, calls, direction requests and messages against your starting point.