Google's Business Profile guidelines center on three pillars: accurate representation, relevance, and authenticity. Your listing must reflect a real business with genuine customer interactions at a verifiable location or service area. The primary category should match your core business function, not aspirational services you barely offer. For example, a law firm that occasionally handles real estate deals should not list as "Real Estate Attorney" if that's 5% of their work. Basic requirements include using your actual registered business name without keyword stuffing, maintaining consistent NAP (name, address, phone) across the web, and selecting a primary category that matches your Google Search Console data on what users actually find you for. Hours must be accurate and updated for holidays. If you're service-area based in Ottawa, you can hide your address but must specify service regions. Prohibited practices that trigger suspensions: soliciting or incentivizing reviews, posting fake reviews from employees or competitors, creating duplicate listings, keyword-stuffing the business name ("Ottawa SEO Inc | Best SEO Agency Ottawa" violates guidelines), or listing virtual offices as physical locations. Google also forbids departments of larger businesses having separate profiles unless they have distinct storefronts with separate customer entrances. Content standards apply to photos, posts, and Q&A. Images must represent your actual business, not stock photos of generic offices. Posts cannot be purely promotional without informational value. The Q&A section should contain real customer questions, not you planting softball questions to game the system. For multi-location businesses, each profile needs unique local phone numbers and genuinely distinct addresses. Bulk verification is available above 10 locations but requires additional documentation proving chain ownership. At Ottawa SEO, we audit profiles monthly because Google updates these guidelines and sometimes re-interprets existing ones during algorithm shifts. A compliant profile in 2023 might need adjustments in 2024. The Business Profile dashboard flags most violations, but manual review by Google can still catch edge cases their automation misses. When in doubt, ask whether a customer physically visiting or calling would experience what your profile promises.