Google Business Profile vs a website: do you need both?

What a Google Business Profile actually does

Your Business Profile is the free listing Google keeps about you. It is what powers the map pack, the panel on the right of a desktop search, and your pin in Google Maps. It costs nothing, it takes an afternoon to fill in properly, and for a local business it is usually the single highest-return hour of work available.

What it is genuinely good at:

• Showing up for near me searches. Somebody standing in Bedford searching for a plumber gets a map and three businesses. That block is drawn almost entirely from profiles, not websites.
• Collecting reviews. The star rating and the count that appear beside your name live here. See the guide on getting reviews for how to keep them coming.
• One tap to call or navigate. No page load, no menu, no contact form. On a phone that is worth a great deal.
• Costing nothing. There is no version of this argument where you skip the profile.

If you only ever do one thing, claim and finish the profile. Categories, service area, hours, services, and real photographs of real work. We do this as a one-time setup for $199 because it is worth doing right once, but there is nothing stopping you doing it yourself in an afternoon.

Where the profile stops

The trouble starts when the profile is the only thing you have. Five limits, and they are structural rather than fixable:

• You do not own it. Google owns the platform and can suspend a profile, sometimes for reasons that take weeks to unpick. If that is your whole presence, you are offline until an appeal clears.
• You cannot look different. Every profile in your category has the same fields in the same order. There is no room to explain why you are the one to call, only room to be listed.
• It only works in local search. The profile does not rank for “what does a heat pump cost in Nova Scotia” or “how long does a bathroom renovation take”, which are the searches people run before they are ready to phone anyone.
• It barely captures leads. No estimator, no proper form, no automatic reply. The lead either calls you right then or is gone with no trace they were ever there.
• There is almost nothing for an AI to read. A name, a category, a rating and a handful of fields. That is not enough for an assistant to say anything specific about you.

Side by side, honestly

Neither one is better. They cover different ground, and the overlap is smaller than people expect.

Put crudely, the profile decides whether you are on the shortlist. The site decides whether the shortlist picks you. Spending on ads to get onto a shortlist and then having nothing to convince anyone is where a lot of local marketing money quietly goes.

How the two feed each other

This is the part that gets missed. They are not two separate marketing channels sitting side by side. They reinforce each other, and the reinforcement is mechanical rather than vague.

• Service pages back up your categories. A real page about heat pump installation makes the profile's claim to that service more credible to Google, not just to a reader.
• Town pages back up your service area. If the profile says you cover four towns, having something real to say about each of them supports it. Four near-identical pages with the town name swapped do the opposite and have been penalised for years.
• Matching details. Your name, address and phone number identical in both places. Two versions of your address is a small permanent tax on your local visibility.
• The link sends traffic somewhere useful. The website field on the profile is one of the most clicked things on it. Where it lands decides whether that click becomes an enquiry.
• The site can keep reviews flowing. The request that goes out when a job closes comes from your site's systems and lands on the profile. See the reviews guide.

What an AI assistant can actually say about you

A growing share of buyers now ask an assistant before they search. “Who should I call for an electrician in Dartmouth” is a question people put to a chat window, and the answer is assembled from whatever is readable about you.

From a profile, an assistant gets your name, your category, a rating and an address. That is enough to list you. It is not enough to recommend you, because there is nothing specific to say.

From a website with a clean heading structure and real service pages, it can say what you actually do, which towns you cover, what a job typically involves, and roughly what it costs. That is the difference between being one of four names in a list and being the one with a sentence of reasoning attached.

This is not a new discipline. It is the same clean structure that has always helped search engines and screen readers, which the on-page SEO guide covers in detail. The audience just grew.

The order to do it in

If money is tight, and for most people starting out it is, the sequence matters more than the total.

• First, claim and finish the profile. It is free and it is the fastest route to the phone ringing. Categories, service area, hours, services, real photos.
• Second, start the review habit. Also free. It compounds, and it is the thing that moves you up within the map pack.
• Third, build the site. Pages that answer the questions people search before they are ready to call, and a clear way to get in touch.
• Fourth, wire them together. Matching details everywhere, the profile linking to the site, the site asking for reviews back onto the profile.