For local SEO in Geneva, your company’s Google Business Profile and your website should give the same accurate information, and each service you offer should have its own page on the site. Google ranks local results on relevance, distance and prominence. There is no way to pay for a better position.
How do you complete your Google Business Profile in Geneva?
Points 5 and 8 are good practice; the other seven rest on a Google guideline, linked in the text.
- Check your eligibility. Google states that “a business must make in-person contact with customers during its stated hours” and excludes online-only businesses (business eligibility guidelines). If you work with clients only remotely, do not create a profile: your website and directory listings then carry your contact details.
- Choose the primary category. Google asks you to “use as few categories as possible to describe your overall core business” and to pick categories that complete the statement “This business IS a” rather than “this business HAS a” (guidelines for representing your business). Your list of services belongs elsewhere in the profile.
- Set service areas without an address. If you don’t serve customers at your address, Google asks you to remove it from your profile. You can set up to 20 service areas based on cities, postcodes or other areas, and the boundaries of the overall area shouldn’t be more than about 2 hours of driving time from where your business is based (managing service areas). A hybrid business, which also receives customers, shows its address and a service area.
- Enter opening hours and services. Provide your regular customer-facing hours, and add special hours for public holidays or particular events (guidelines for representing your business). Then list the services you actually provide, under the names they have on your website.
- Add real photos. Show your work, your projects or your place of work. A stock image says nothing about your business.
- Ask for Google reviews and reply to them. Google lets you send customers a link or a QR code to leave a review, and recommends replying to reviews (tips to get more reviews). The same page states that offering incentives, such as free or discounted goods or services, in exchange for posting, changing or removing a review is strictly prohibited. Google’s Maps content policy also removes incentivised or biased reviews and content based on a conflict of interest, such as current or former employment. Ask for a review from clients whose project has taken place, with nothing in return.
- Keep contact details identical on your website, your profile, local.ch and search.ch. Your profile name should reflect your business’s real-world name, “as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery”, and Google asks for a local phone number instead of a call centre number whenever possible (guidelines for representing your business). Use the same phone number and opening hours everywhere. local.ch and search.ch are the two platforms of localsearch, which offers a free basic business entry; the procedure takes place on local.ch. Once registered, check that your details appear identically on both sites.
- Give each real service its own page. Each service in your profile matches a page on your website that explains the service, its conditions and how to contact you. When I carry out a website project in Geneva, I prepare these pages with their headings and internal links. If some of your clients write in English, a bilingual French-English website gives each service a page in each language.
- Link your profile to the right page. The website field of your profile should point to a website that represents your business (guidelines for representing your business). Also check the links in your other profiles, directory listings and email signatures. If a redesign changes the addresses of your pages, update these links and plan redirects during a redesign for the old addresses.
How does Google rank local results?
According to Google’s help page (tips to improve your local ranking), local results are mainly based on three criteria. The summary sentence on that page says “popularity”; the heading that defines the third criterion says “prominence”.
| Criterion | Google’s definition | What depends on you |
|---|---|---|
| Relevance | How well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for | A complete and detailed profile (points 2 to 5) |
| Distance | How far each business is from the person searching; if they don’t share their location, Google uses what it knows about it | Nothing: it depends on where the person searches from |
| Prominence | How well known a business is, also based on how many websites link to it and how many reviews it has | Genuine links to your website and reviews requested within the rules (points 6 and 7) |
Google’s local ranking help page states: “There’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.” A complete profile and a well-linked website help Google understand your business. They guarantee no position, either on Maps or in Search.
A profile without an address: the Eljadi WORKS case
As of 5 October 2026, the Eljadi WORKS Google Business Profile exists. I don’t receive clients at any premises, so the profile is that of a service-area business, set up as follows.
| Item | Setting | Checklist point |
|---|---|---|
| Address | No address shown | 3 |
| Primary category | “Concepteur de sites Web” (website designer), as labelled in the French-language interface | 2 |
| Area | Service areas around Geneva, within the limit of 20 set by Google | 3 |
| Opening hours | Monday to Friday, 9 am to 6 pm, as in the website’s structured data | 4 and 7 |
The profile has no statistics yet: this case describes only its configuration, with no figures on the enquiries it brings in.
How do you know whether your profile brings in clients?
Three sources complement each other:
- Your contacts. Ask each new contact how they found the business. Record their answer and distinguish an information request from a quote request or a client won. This tells you which interactions led to business.
- Your profile statistics. They show how customers use Search and Maps to find your profile, and what actions they take once they do. You can set a date range to follow them over time; the data also includes interactions from Google Ads (Business Profile performance).
- Search Console, for your website. The performance report counts clicks from Google Search results, impressions, meaning how many times your site appeared in those results, and the average position of your topmost result (Search Console Help).
A useful record states the period, the retrieval date and the page concerned. On eljadiworks.com, from 7 July to 4 October 2026 (data retrieved on 6 October 2026), the previous version of this article received 7 impressions in English and 3 in French, with no clicks. At such a low volume, these figures support no conclusion.
Sources
- Google, Google Business Profile Help, “Tips to improve your local ranking on Google”, consulted 6 October 2026.
- Google, Google Business Profile Help, “Business eligibility and ownership guidelines”, consulted 6 October 2026.
- Google, Google Business Profile Help, “Guidelines for representing your business on Google”, consulted 6 October 2026.
- Google, Google Business Profile Help, “Manage your service areas for service-area & hybrid businesses”, consulted 6 October 2026.
- Google, Google Business Profile Help, “Tips to get more reviews”, consulted 6 October 2026.
- Google, Maps User Generated Content Policy Help, “Prohibited & restricted content”, consulted 6 October 2026.
- Google, Google Business Profile Help, “Understand your Business Profile performance & insights”, consulted 6 October 2026.
- Google, Search Console Help, “Performance report (Search results): Overview and basic setup”, consulted 6 October 2026.
- localsearch, “Get started today – at no cost”, page modified 25 June 2026, consulted 6 October 2026.
