Google Business Profile and website: linking them

The Google Business Profile and the website are two shop windows of the same business. The profile is what people see on the map, at the moment they search. The website is where they check, compare, book. Well linked, they send people back and forth and say the same thing.

Here is how to do it, based on Google’s official help, and what not to expect.

What Google takes from your website

Google builds a profile from four kinds of sources: public information found on the web, including the business’s official website; data licensed from third parties; what users and owners enter; and what Google observes of the place itself.

So your website feeds what Google knows about you. For a restaurant, Google goes further: it says it can transcribe the menu published on the business’s website to show it on the profile.

Don’t credit it with a power it doesn’t have, though. In its help on local ranking, the factors Google cites are the number of sites that link to your business, that is, other people’s sites, and your reviews; your own website isn’t among them. Ranking is covered in detail in our article on local SEO.

The website link: the right address

In the profile, the website field expects a full address, starting with “https://”. Three rules:

the address leads to your website, the business’s own. Google refuses addresses that redirect elsewhere, including a social media page set up as a relay;
the website is open to Google’s bots: the profile help asks you to check that they aren’t blocked;
the website says the same thing as the profile: same name, same address, same phone, same opening hours.

Once the profile is verified, Google shows you in its performance data how many people clicked the website link, called, or asked for directions, as well as the searches that led to you. These search terms are updated at the start of each month.

The menu, the services, booking

The profile accepts links other than the website’s.

A menu or services link, just one: a restaurant’s menu, the list of services of a practice or a beauty salon.
Action links, up to ten per category: book an appointment, reserve a table, order a meal. If you have several, you can set one as the preferred link, shown first.

Some of Google’s partner platforms also add their own links to your profile. You can remove a provider; Google gives it five days to comply.

Food businesses also have a menu editor: sections, dishes, descriptions and prices. Google warns that a change can take 24 to 48 hours to show. You can also upload photos or a PDF of the menu, and Google offers, on an experimental basis, to turn it into a menu with AI, to be checked before publishing.

The simplest is still to keep a single source up to date. Write the menu and prices as text on your website, point the profile’s menu link to that page, and make the website’s booking button and the profile’s link lead to the same tool. A price change then happens once, not three times.

Opening hours: a single calendar

For opening hours, the profile offers three separate tools:

Special hours, for a closure of at most six consecutive days, a public holiday, an event.
The “temporarily closed” status, from seven days of closure, or for an unknown length of time.
More hours, for a service with different hours: a restaurant’s takeout, delivery.

Google also advises confirming holiday hours, even when they don’t change: customers then know the information has been checked.

So a bakery that closes for three weeks in August sets the profile to “temporarily closed” and writes it on its website, at the top of the page, on the same day. On the day it reopens, both change together.

From the website to the profile

The link works both ways. On your website, think of:

a “Leave a review” link: Google provides a link and a QR code for this, to share with your customers;
a directions link to your business on Google Maps;
the address and phone written exactly as on the profile.

Google says nowhere that these links lift the profile. They serve your visitors: a happy customer finds where to leave a review, a customer in a hurry finds the way.

Verifying the profile through the website

To fully manage a profile, and see its performance, you have to verify it: by phone or text, by email, by video, by live video call, sometimes by mail. Google adds that, in some cases, verification is instant when you have already verified your website in Search Console. One more reason to set it up: our step-by-step guide explains how.

On a site built in the studio

On a site composed in the 29webs studio, the call-to-action button leads wherever you want: the https address of your booking tool, your phone number or your email. Give it the same link as on the profile, and the same number in the contact block.

In short: your website is one of the sources Google builds the profile from. Make them point to each other, keep the menu, prices and opening hours in one place, and change everything on the same day.