What monthly management covers
- Accuracy: name, address or service-area settings, phone, website, hours including bank holidays, categories, attributes and services, checked every month and after every Google change.
- Posts: regular updates and offers written for your customers, with photos, so the profile shows activity.
- Photos: a monthly review of what is on the profile, removal requests for wrong or unflattering images added by others, and guidance on what to send us.
- Reviews: every review answered in your voice within an agreed window, and policy-breaking reviews reported through the correct route. The reply service can also be taken on its own.
- Questions and answers: customer questions answered, and the common ones seeded so the answers are there before they are asked.
- Watching: suggested edits from the public, unexpected owner or manager changes, new duplicate listings, and the early signs of a suspension, caught before they cost you the profile.
- Reporting: a short monthly note in plain English on calls, direction requests, website clicks and what changed.
What it does not do
Management does not buy map pack position. A perfectly maintained profile still ranks where its reviews, proximity, website and citations put it. If you want to move up, that is the Google Maps ranking or local SEO work, and we will say plainly which you need. Some businesses need only management; some need both; a few need neither yet.
It also does not involve fake reviews, incentives for reviews, review gating, keyword-stuffed names or any of the shortcuts that get profiles suspended. Those are the things a good manager stops you doing.
Setup, consultant or management?
Setup and consulting are both available on their own; most owners who ask about them end up on management because the watching is the part they cannot do themselves.
- Setup: you have no profile, or a half-finished one, and want it created, verified and filled in correctly once. A one-off job, quoted as such.
- Consultant: you or your team will run the profile, and want an expert to audit it, fix the structural problems and show you what to do. A one-off audit with a written plan.
- Management: you want it done for you, every month, with someone watching. This page.
How the first month works
Week one is an audit: every field against Google's guidelines, every category against what you actually sell, every duplicate and practitioner listing found, and the review and photo history read. Anything that could trigger a suspension is fixed first, slowly, because a burst of edits on a profile that has been quiet for years is itself a trigger.
Weeks two to four establish the rhythm: posts, replies, questions, photos, and the first plain-English report. From month two the profile is simply looked after.
After a suspension, why management matters
A reinstated profile is on a shorter leash. The same edit that passes on a clean profile can suspend one that has been flagged before, and a stranger's suggested edit that Google accepts can undo the fix. Most of the businesses we reinstate move onto management for at least the following months, because the cheapest suspension is the one that never happens.
Reporting you can read
Google's own insights are noisy and change definitions without warning. The monthly note translates them: how many people called or asked for directions from the profile, how that compares with last month, what was changed, what was caught, and what we suggest next. No dashboards you have to log into.