The SiteRoot team7 min read
A mortgage broker with a complete Google Business Profile, a set of photos, current hours and a decent run of reviews has a fair question: why pay for a website on top of that. It is the right question, and the answer is not "because everyone has one".
The short version is that they are two different things doing two different jobs, and neither one substitutes for the other. The profile is how you appear in the box with the map, and it is a listing inside Google's product, sitting next to your competitors, arranged the way Google chooses on the day. Your website is the only place on the internet where the whole screen is yours, where you decide what is said and in what order, and where a person goes when the listing has done its job and they now want to know whether you are actually right for them. The profile gets you considered. The website is where the decision gets made.
What is the difference, in one paragraph
A Google Business Profile is a free listing you claim and fill in: name, category, address or service area, hours, phone number, photos, and the reviews people leave. It lives on Google's servers and appears in Google's results. You do not host it, you do not own it, and you cannot change what surrounds it.
A website is a set of pages at your own address that you own. It appears in search results too, it is what your profile links to, and it is what someone lands on from a van sticker, a flyer, an email signature or a mate passing on your name. It is also the only one of the two that still exists if a listing is suspended.
Why can't the profile just be my website
For most businesses it cannot, and the reasons are structural rather than snobbish.
A profile has one screen and a fixed set of fields. There is no room to explain that you do emergency call outs but only within twenty kilometres, that you are accredited for a particular brand of system, or what actually happens after someone rings. Anything that needs a paragraph has nowhere to go.
You also do not control what sits beside it. Competitors appear in the same box, often with an ad above them. On your own page, nothing is competing for attention.
And a profile can be suspended. It happens for mundane reasons, like a category change that trips a review or an address that looks like a residential one. Businesses do get them back, and in the meantime everything they have built is switched off at once. If the profile is your entire presence, that is your entire presence gone for a fortnight.
What does the website do for the profile
More than most owners expect, and it runs in both directions.
Google is trying to work out whether a listing describes a real, operating business. One of the things it looks at is the website that listing points to. A profile pointing at nothing, or at a page that has been broken since a hosting bill lapsed, has less behind it than one pointing at a site that plainly describes the same business, in the same suburb, with the same phone number.
The website is also where the detail lives that a profile has no field for. If someone searches for a specific service rather than a trade, the thing that can match it is a page about that service, not a category dropdown with one value in it.
Which page should the profile point at
The home page, in almost every case, and one that loads fast on a phone.
Two things to avoid. Do not point it at a Facebook page, because a chunk of what is there is behind a login and you have then linked a listing to another listing. And do not point it at a page buried three clicks deep because it is the one you are proudest of. The person tapping that link is still deciding whether you are real. They want the top of the story, not the middle.
If you have a physical address people come to, it is worth making sure the home page states it in text rather than only inside an embedded map, because the map is a picture as far as a lot of software is concerned.
What has to match between the two
This is the boring part that actually matters, because the whole exercise is Google deciding whether two mentions describe the same business.
- Business name. The same words, the same order, the same abbreviations. Not "Ryan Electrical" in one place and "Ryan Electrical Services Pty Ltd" in the other.
- Phone number. One number, written the same way. If the profile has a mobile and the site has a landline you no longer answer, fix the site.
- Address, or service area. Identical, including the unit number and whether it is Street or St.
- Hours. If the site says Saturday mornings and the profile says closed weekends, one of them is teaching people something false.
- Category and what the site says. If the profile category is Electrician, the site should say the word electrician in a sentence, not only imply it.
None of that is clever. All of it is commonly wrong, usually because the site was built in 2019 and the profile was filled in last spring by a different person.
What about the photos and the reviews
Reviews only live on the profile, and they are one of the strongest things you have. Ask for them, plainly, after a job goes well. Do not offer anything in exchange, do not write them yourself, and reply to the bad ones calmly in public, because the reply is read by everyone who comes after.
Photos are worth doing in both places, and they should be your own. A real photo of your van, your shopfront or a finished job answers the one question in a stranger's head, which is whether you are an actual business near them. A stock photo of a generic tradesman in a generic kitchen answers it badly in both directions.
Upload your good photos to the profile and use the same ones on the site. Consistency is doing quiet work here.
What to do if you have a profile and no website
Claim and complete the profile first if you have not, because it is free and it is the fastest thing on this list.
Then get a site up, even a small one. Five pages that state what you do, where you do it, what it costs roughly, who you have worked for and how to reach you will outperform a twenty page site that never got finished. The most common failure is not a bad website. It is a website that has been "nearly ready" for eight months.
How this works on a SiteRoot site
We build the website half, and we build it so it agrees with your profile without anyone having to police it.
The business name, phone number, email and service area you give us are used consistently across every page, rather than retyped per page and drifting apart. Phone numbers are tap-to-call links. Each page carries a block of facts naming the specific business type Google publishes for your trade, with your contact details attached, which is the machine-readable version of the same consistency. Your details are also published in plain words in a file called llms.txt that AI tools can read directly.
Changing your hours or your number takes a minute and costs nothing, which matters more than it sounds: the reason these two things disagree is almost never carelessness. It is that updating the website used to mean emailing someone and paying for an hour.
We do not manage your Google Business Profile, and we would not want anyone to think we do. That is yours to claim, fill in and keep current. What we can do is make sure the website it points at says the same thing.
