Google Business Profile: the local SEO guide for Montréal and South Shore businesses

When someone searches "accountant near me" or "plombier Longueuil", the first thing they see is usually not a list of websites. It is a map with three businesses: the Local Pack. Those three spots are driven largely by your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business). For many local businesses, it brings more calls than the website itself.

Google says local ranking depends on three things: relevance (does your profile match the search), distance (how close you are to the searcher) and prominence (how well known and trusted you are). You can't move your office, but you can work on the other two.

1. Get the basics exactly right

Name, address, phone (NAP)

Use your real business name, without keywords added. "NeoLabs" is fine; "NeoLabs Best Web Agency Montréal" breaks Google's guidelines and can get the profile suspended.

Then make sure your name, address and phone number are identical everywhere: your website footer, your contact page, your structured data, Facebook, the Yellow Pages, industry directories. Small differences ("Saint-Hubert" here, "Longueuil" there; "suite 3" here, "bureau 3" there) dilute the signal.

Service-area businesses

If you serve clients at their location (contractors, cleaning, IT support) and don't receive them at your address, you can hide the address and define a service area instead. Keep the service area realistic: the regions you actually serve.

2. Choose categories carefully

The primary category is one of the strongest relevance signals. Pick the most specific one that describes your core business ("Dentist" rather than "Health"). Add a few secondary categories for real services you offer, not for everything you could do.

3. Fill every field

• Description: what you do, for whom and where, in plain language. Write it in French first; a short English sentence can follow if you serve both communities.
• Services and products with short descriptions.
• Hours, including holiday hours. Inaccurate hours are one of the most common reasons for bad reviews.
• Attributes such as accessibility, languages spoken or online appointments.
• Website link pointing to the most relevant page. A clinic with several locations should link each profile to its location page, not to the homepage.

4. Reviews: steady, real and answered

Reviews feed prominence, and they convince people to call.

• Ask every satisfied client, at the right moment: after the delivery, not with the invoice. A short link or QR code makes it easy.
• Never offer incentives for reviews and never filter who you ask based on whether they are happy. Both break Google's policies.
• Reply to every review, in the language it was written in. Thank the positive ones briefly; answer negative ones calmly, with facts and an offer to resolve it offline.

A steady flow of recent reviews matters more than a big batch from two years ago.

5. Photos and posts

Upload real photos: your storefront (so people recognize it), your team, your work. Avoid stock images. Posts (offers, news, events) keep the profile active and can answer common questions before people call.

6. Connect the profile to your website

Your profile and your website reinforce each other:

• Add LocalBusiness structured data to your site with the same NAP, hours and coordinates as the profile.
• Create a dedicated page for each location or main service area, with genuinely local content: clients you serve there, projects, landmarks. Avoid near-identical pages where only the city name changes: Google treats them as low-quality doorway pages.
• Embed a map and directions on your contact page.

7. Measure what it brings

The profile's performance report shows searches, calls, direction requests and website clicks. Add UTM tracking to the website link so you can see those visits in Google Analytics. Check monthly, and compare month over month, not day by day.

Need help?

Local SEO is the core of our SEO service: Google Business Profile optimization, citation cleanup, local pages and reviews strategy, in French and English. Ask for a free local audit.