Google Business Profile is the platform businesses use to control their presence across Google's local services—Search, Maps, and Shopping. It replaced the "Google My Business" brand in 2021, though many people still use the old name. When you claim and verify your business, you get a dashboard to update your address, hours, phone number, categories, photos, and respond to reviews. This profile powers the Knowledge Panel that appears when someone searches your business name, and it determines whether you show up in the Local Pack (the map with three businesses) for relevant searches in your area. The profile itself is free, but its value comes from completeness and activity. Businesses that regularly post updates, upload photos, collect reviews, and answer questions tend to rank better in local results than dormant profiles. Google also uses signals like review velocity, response rate, and how often your information matches what's on your website to assess trustworthiness. At Ottawa SEO, we treat Google Business Profile as the foundation of any local campaign. For Toronto or Montreal service-area businesses, we optimize the service area settings and categories carefully, because one misconfigured category can tank your visibility for the terms that matter. We also tie the profile to the same NAP (name, address, phone) used across your website and citations to avoid confusion in Google's entity graph. The biggest mistakes we see: using a PO box when you have a real location, stuffing keywords into the business name, ignoring review responses, and leaving attributes blank. Google punishes keyword-stuffed names now, and empty profiles signal abandonment. If you're competing in Ottawa's legal, dental, or contractor spaces, your competitors are almost certainly active on their profiles, so treating it as a set-it-and-forget-it listing means you're already behind.