Local search and Google Business Profile, category first

What moves the pack: The primary category. Across the profiles we have measured over the past two years, changing the primary category moved pack visibility more than every other edit we made put together. Nine profiles ran weekly Posts for twelve weeks against a measured baseline and we could not isolate a single visibility effect. That is the whole argument for how this engagement spends its hours: category, proximity, the fields that feed the local index, and a measurement setup honest enough to show when we are wrong. The category decision: Google's taxonomy runs to several thousand categories and permits one primary plus nine additional. Most profiles we inherit have a primary chosen for how it reads to a human and secondaries chosen by exhausting the list. Both are mistakes. We test candidate primaries against the queries that produce a pack in your area, check which category the current pack incumbents use, and then change one thing at a time so the result is attributable. Secondaries are added for services you actually deliver, because they widen the query surface but they also invite the wrong searcher, and a customer who arrives expecting a service you do not offer leaves the review that costs you the next ten. The rest of the profile: Service areas, capped at twenty, and set to where staff actually travel. Hours, including special hours around Koningsdag, Bevrijdingsdag and the December closures that produce your worst reviews of the year when they are wrong. Attributes, which are the fields most often left empty and are read by filtered searches. Products and services, written as the thing a customer books, not as keyword strings. Verification in the Netherlands runs against your KVK record, so the trading name, address and legal entity have to agree before anything else is worth touching. Suspension: We will not put keywords in your business name. It works, it is against the guidelines, it is reported by competitors within weeks in dense categories, and reinstatement takes your profile out of the pack for the duration. We say the same about listing addresses you do not occupy. If you arrived here already suspended, we handle reinstatement, which means assembling the evidence Google's reviewers accept — the KVK extract, signage photographs, a utility invoice, the lease — and submitting once, properly, because repeated appeals harden the decision. Measurement: A single ranking number for a local business is meaningless, since the result depends on where the searcher stands. We build a geo-grid across your catchment at a defined radius and interval, and pull the Business Profile Performance API, which returns daily metrics across roughly an eighteen-month window, into a store you own rather than a dashboard you rent. Reviews still sit only on the older v4 endpoint, which is worth knowing before you buy review tooling built on top of it. The output is a baseline, then a record of what each edit did. Not included: Review gating, review incentives or anything that manufactures ratings. Monthly Posts calendars, which we consider billable busywork. Photo packages. Citation blasts to hundreds of directories, when the handful that matter in the Netherlands are Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, De Telefoongids and your own sector's registries. Not for you if: You sell online only, with no premises and no staff who travel. Or you are a fintech with one Amsterdam office hoping to appear for generic finance queries, which do not return a local pack, so this budget belongs elsewhere and we will point you to where. Or you want the profile handed back optimised without anyone internally owning it afterwards, because hours, staff and services change and a profile is a live record.