Google Business Profile for hotels: the 12 things most get wrong

The most common serious mistake on a hotel's Google Business Profile is the primary category, and it is wrong on roughly half the properties I audit. Everything else on this list matters, but categories decide which competitive set you are ranked within — get that wrong and no amount of photos, posts or review chasing will rescue you.

Here are the twelve, in the order I check them.

1. The primary category is wrong

Google uses your primary category to decide which searches you are eligible for. A 14-room family-run property listed as "Hotel" is being ranked against 200-room hotels; listed as "Guesthouse", it is ranked against its actual peers.

On a guesthouse in Pokhara, changing this single dropdown from "Hotel" to "Guesthouse" moved it from position 14 to position 11 in the local pack within nine days, with nothing else changed. It took four minutes.

Pick the category a guest would use to describe you, not the most impressive-sounding one. Then add every applicable secondary category — "Bed & breakfast", "Budget hotel", "Extended stay hotel" — and nothing that does not apply, because irrelevant categories dilute rather than broaden.

2. The name field contains keywords

Your profile name should be your business name, exactly as it appears on your signage. "Hillview Guesthouse — Best Budget Hotel in Pokhara Lakeside" is a guidelines violation, it is reportable by any competitor, and suspensions take weeks to reverse.

It also no longer works well enough to be worth the risk. Whatever short-term lift keyword stuffing produced years ago has been substantially discounted, and the downside remains total.

3. Hours are technically correct and practically wrong

Three separate fields, and most properties fill in one. Regular hours, special hours for holidays, and — for hospitality — a distinction between reception hours and check-in availability that most profiles never make clear.

Festival periods matter enormously in Nepal and are almost never set. A profile showing "Open 24 hours" during Dashain when reception is unstaffed produces a bad review that outlives the holiday by years.

4. The booking link points at an OTA

Check this today. Many profiles were set up by an OTA account manager, and the booking link goes to Booking.com — so Google sends a guest who found you organically through a channel that takes 15–18% commission.

The field is yours. Point it at your own booking page. For a property doing thirty direct-eligible bookings a month, this one change is worth more than most of the rest of this list combined.

5. Services and attributes are empty

Attributes are how Google matches you to filtered and long-tail searches: "hotel with parking", "pet friendly guesthouse", "hotel with airport shuttle". If the attribute is not set, you are not eligible, no matter how true it is.

Go through every applicable attribute — accessibility, amenities, payment methods, languages spoken, family friendliness. It takes twenty minutes and it makes you eligible for searches you cannot otherwise reach. "Free wifi" alone appears in a startling share of accommodation queries.

6. Photos are old, few, or professionally generic

Two problems here, and they pull in opposite directions.

Volume and recency matter: profiles with photos added in the last thirty days look open, and guests choosing between three map results notice. Add a few every month, phone photos are fine.

But type matters more than most owners think. Real photographs of your actual rooms, your actual breakfast, and your actual view outperform professional shots taken at a flattering angle in 2019, because guests can tell the difference and because the review that follows a mismatch is brutal. Photograph the room a guest will actually get.

7. Reviews are unanswered

Every review from the last ninety days should have a response. This is visible to guests, it is a documented factor in local ranking, and the absence of it reads as a property that has stopped paying attention.

Respond to negative reviews without arguing. One sentence acknowledging the specific problem, one on what changed. Future guests are reading your response far more carefully than the review itself.

8. There is no review ask, so review velocity is flat

A steady trickle of new reviews signals an operating business. A profile with 200 reviews, none in the past year, signals something that might have closed.

The ask has to fit the check-out flow or it will not happen. What works: a printed card with a QR code handed over with the receipt, plus a WhatsApp message twenty-four hours after departure. What does not work: a laminated sign in reception, or an email sent a week later.

Ask for specifics — "if the garden rooms were what you were after, mentioning that helps other people find us." Specific reviews are better for ranking and dramatically better for AI visibility, because they give a machine something concrete to quote.

9. Duplicate listings exist and nobody has checked

Independent properties accumulate duplicates: one from the previous owner, one created by an OTA, one from a mis-typed address. They split your reviews and your ranking signals between two entries.

Search your business name, address and phone number separately in Google Maps. If you find a duplicate, claim it and request a merge rather than deleting it — deletion loses the reviews attached to it.

10. The NAP does not match the rest of the web

Your name, address and phone number must be identical everywhere: profile, website footer, TripAdvisor, every OTA, every directory. Not similar. Identical.

The Pokhara guesthouse had three phone numbers live across nineteen listings — an old landline, a personal mobile, and one with a mistyped digit. Google reading three numbers cannot confirm which business it is looking at, and confidence is what local ranking runs on. Standardise on one string, write it in a document, and give that document to anyone who ever lists the property.

11. The Q&A section is empty or answered by strangers

Anyone can ask a question on your profile, and anyone can answer it — including a guest who is wrong. An unanswered or badly answered question sits there indefinitely.

Seed it yourself. Post the six questions your reception is asked every day (parking, airport pickup, check-in time, breakfast included, wifi, luggage storage) and answer them properly from the business account. It takes fifteen minutes and it removes the objections that stop a booking.

12. Nobody is looking at the performance data

Your profile reports how people found you — the split between searches for your name and searches for a category, how many people asked for directions, called, or clicked through to your site.

The brand versus non-brand split is the number that matters. If almost all your views come from people searching your name, you are being found by people who already know you exist, and you are invisible to everyone else. That is the problem local SEO solves, and it is worth checking monthly, because it tells you whether anything you are doing is working before rankings move.

What to do this week

Open your profile and check three things: the primary category, where the booking link points, and whether a duplicate listing exists. Those three take twenty minutes together and account for more lost visibility than the other nine combined.

Then work down the rest of the list in order. If you would rather it were done properly in one pass — including the citation cleanup that items 9 and 10 imply, which is genuinely tedious — that is what my local SEO work covers, and the free checklist has the whole thing in a form you can run yourself.