Complete Local SEO Guide / Step 3

How to create your business profile and brand voice

This is the record every other step reads from. The business profile holds the facts, the services, the trust signals and the voice that each page, audit and report is built on. Fill it out completely and honestly once, and everything downstream gets easier and more accurate.

The profile feeds everything else

Treat this as the one source of truth for the business. The audit matches your pages against the services listed here. The writing step pulls the facts, the services and the voice from here. The reports read the categories and areas from here. When this record is thin or wrong, every step after it inherits the gap. When it is complete and honest, the rest of the guide runs on solid ground.

Business facts and the six trust facts

Start with the plain facts: the business name, address, phone, hours, the area you serve, and the services you actually offer. Keep these identical to what is on the verified profile and in the website schema.

Then capture the six trust facts, the things that reassure a buyer before they call:

• Credentials: licences, certifications, insurance, years in the trade.
• Process: how a job actually runs, from first call to finished work.
• Guarantee: the warranty or promise that backs the work.
• Pricing: how you charge, what a typical job costs, what is free.
• Who you are a fit for: the customers and jobs you are right for, and the ones you are not.
• Proof: reviews, finished projects, named results a reader can check.

Categories and services

Categories and services are how Google and a reader understand what you do. Get three things right:

• One accurate primary category that describes the main thing the business is. Do not inflate it to something broader than the real work.
• Every relevant secondary category you genuinely serve, and none you do not. A category for work you do not really do invites mismatched searches and weakens trust.
• Specific services, not broad buckets. List the real jobs you do, and include the name variations customers actually search, because people look for the same service under different words.

Local and maps details

Anchor the profile to the real listing. Record the verified profile's Google Maps link and its Place ID, and keep them with the business facts. These give the local and maps work, including the rank map, a reliable reference point instead of a guess about which listing is yours.

Brand voice

Every page in this guide is written in the business voice, so the voice has to be captured, not invented. Record how the business actually talks: its tone, the words it uses and the words it avoids, and how formal or plain it is.

Ground it in real material. Paste in existing copy, a few customer emails, a page the owner likes, anything that shows the real voice. A voice built from real examples sounds like the business. A voice written from a blank page sounds generic, and readers can tell. Keep these examples in the profile so every writer, human or machine, works from the same reference.

Keyword and ranking data

If you already have keyword research or ranking data, add it here too. Target terms, search volumes, and current positions all belong with the profile, so the audit and the writing steps can work against real demand rather than assumptions. If you do not have this yet, the profile still works; you can add the data once the rank map and research steps produce it.