Your Google Business Profile is doing more for your business than your website.

A few months ago a hospitality client called us in a panic. They had spent ₦600,000 on a website redesign earlier in the year — a beautiful, slow, image-heavy thing — and bookings were flat. Worse than flat. They were quietly declining. The owner was certain the new design was the problem and wanted us to redesign it again.

We looked. The site wasn't great, but it wasn't the problem. The problem was sitting in plain sight, and it took us about four minutes to find it. Their Google Business Profile was 40% complete, had two duplicate listings, and the phone number on Google was a number they'd stopped using in 2023.

For most small Nigerian businesses, this is the actual story.

The maths nobody shows you

When a Lagos resident wants a short-let, a restaurant, a dentist, or a lawyer, they don't visit your website first. They open Google or Google Maps, type "thing near me" or "thing in area," and tap one of the top results. The top results are Google Business Profile listings, not websites.

Industry data varies, but for typical small-business categories in Nigerian cities, somewhere between 60% and 80% of customer interactions happen directly on the Google profile — calls, direction requests, photo views, profile-only visits. Your website only enters the picture if the profile is good enough to earn the click.

What "doing more" actually means

A complete, active Google Business Profile does several jobs that a website cannot do, no matter how well-designed:

1. It appears at the top of Maps searches — where intent is highest.
2. It collects and displays reviews prominently — the single biggest trust signal for local buyers.
3. It surfaces your phone number with a one-tap call — no friction.
4. It tells Google you're open, busy, or closed — which influences how often you appear.
5. It supports posts, offers, and Q&A — content delivered inside the search experience.

Most importantly, it does all of this before the customer leaves Google. The bar to interact is lower than for a website by an order of magnitude.

Why most Nigerian SMEs ignore it

Three reasons, roughly in order of how often we see them:

1. Nobody told them it mattered

Web designers and "digital marketing" agencies tend to focus on what they sell — websites, ads, social media. The Google Business Profile is free, lives outside their dashboard, and earns them nothing. So it gets skipped.

2. The verification process feels intimidating

Google's verification options (postcard by mail, video call, sometimes phone) feel like more hassle than they're worth. They aren't. The postcard takes 5 working days; the video call takes 20 minutes. We routinely walk clients through it.

3. The dashboard is genuinely a bit ugly

Google Business Profile Manager is unloved, even by Google. The UI is dated, the options are confusing, and the right settings aren't obvious. So people log in once, get overwhelmed, and never come back.

The Google Business Profile is the most undervalued piece of digital infrastructure for Nigerian SMEs. Free, public, high-impact, and almost universally neglected.

What to do this week

If you're reading this and your business has a physical location or serves a local area, here's a 90-minute Saturday-morning task list:

• Search your business name and check what Google currently shows. Note duplicate listings and wrong information.
• Claim your profile at google.com/business if you haven't.
• Verify it — pick the fastest method Google offers you.
• Fill every section. Categories, services, attributes, hours, holiday hours, business description, products. All of it.
• Add 10 photos minimum. Exterior, interior, team, products/services, before-and-afters.
• Respond to every review, including the old ones. Thank the positive ones, professionally address the negative ones.
• Seed 3–5 Q&A entries with the questions your customers actually ask.
• Post once a week for the next eight weeks. An offer, an event, a tip, a behind-the-scenes photo.

When the website matters more

I should be clear: a good website still matters. It matters most when:

• Your business is service-based with longer consideration cycles (legal, consulting, B2B services)
• Your customers do research before contact (real estate buyers, parents choosing a school)
• You sell online and need a transactional site
• You need to look credible to investors, partners, or larger clients

For those, the website is part of the trust chain. But even there, the Google profile is usually the first impression. A great website behind a broken Google profile is like a beautiful shop with no sign on the front door.

The honest summary

If you're sitting on a tight budget and trying to decide where to spend, this is our honest order of operations:

1. Fix and fully optimise the Google Business Profile (often free, 1–2 weeks of effort)
2. Make sure your existing website loads fast and works on a phone (small fixes, big lift)
3. Set up reviews collection and response workflow (free, ongoing)
4. Then redesign the website if it's actually the bottleneck

Most clients are at step 4 in their head, while they're still failing at step 1. Get the order right, and the budget goes further.

— until the next letter