Your Google Business Profile is doing most of the work.

Claiming it

Most businesses already have a profile they have never logged into — Google generates them from other data sources. Search your own business name and look for "Own this business?" or "Claim this business". Verification is by postcard to the address, by phone, by email, or increasingly by video, where you film the premises, your signage and your tools.

Two things that block a claim: a competitor or an old agency already holds it, in which case you request access and the current owner has seven days to respond; or the address cannot be verified, which is common for coworking desks and registered-office addresses.

The primary category is the single most consequential field

Google allows one primary category and a number of secondary ones. The primary category does more to determine which searches you appear in than anything else on the profile, and people routinely pick the wrong one — a bakery that also serves coffee listing itself as a café and then wondering why it never appears for boulangerie.

Pick the category that names what you primarily are, not the one that sounds most impressive or most modern. Then add secondaries for the genuine additional services. A useful sanity check: search the term you want to rank for, open the top three map results, and look at what they have set. Their categories are visible.

Service area or street address

A shop, restaurant or clinic that customers visit shows its street address. A plumber, electrician, photographer or consultant who travels to the customer should be configured as a service-area business: the address is verified but hidden, and you list the communes or postal codes you cover instead.

Listing every commune in Brussels-Capital when you realistically work in five is worse than listing five. Proximity still governs, and an overreaching service area does not extend it.

Hours, including the ones that catch people out

Regular hours are obvious. The ones that get skipped and then cost a customer:

• Belgian public holidays. Set special hours for each one in advance — Google prompts, and an unanswered prompt shows "hours might differ", which reads as unreliable.
• The summer closure. Many Belgian businesses close for part of July or August. Set it as special hours, never by marking the business temporarily closed.
• Lunch closures. If you genuinely close at midday, split the day into two ranges rather than leaving it open across.

The same hours should appear in your page markup, so the site and the listing agree. That is one of the checks in the 28-point list.

Photos

Photos affect how many people click through from the map pack, which is a real commercial effect whether or not it is a ranking factor. The exterior shot matters most, because it is what someone matches against the street when they arrive. Shoot it in daylight, from the angle a person walking up would see. Replace photos occasionally rather than uploading once and leaving them for four years.

Reviews, and replying to them

Volume and recency both count toward the map pack. Reply to every review, including the negative ones, in the language the reviewer wrote in. A calm, specific reply to a bad review persuades more readers than the review itself dissuades.

Never buy reviews and never offer anything in exchange for one. Google's policy is explicit, detection is decent, and the downside lands on the asset you cannot afford to lose.

What we check by hand

Six of our twenty-eight points cannot be automated, because they need Google's own data or a judgement call. Five of the six are on this page's subject: profile completeness and categories, review volume and recency, name-address-phone consistency across directories, duplicate or competing listings, and competitor positions for your terms. We do those manually per request, which is why the report takes a day rather than arriving instantly.