Google Business Profile for hotels: 7 costly mistakes

Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is the free listing that puts your hotel, B&B, or agriturismo (a farm stay) on Google Search and Google Maps: photos, reviews, room prices, and the buttons to call, get directions, or book. When a couple planning a week in Tuscany looks for an agriturismo with a pool near Lucca, this is what they compare, often before they see your website or your listing on Booking.com, Airbnb, or Vrbo.

A Google Business Profile for hotels doesn’t work like the profile of a shop or a restaurant. Google removes some features for lodging and adds others, and a few popular tips break its rules for hotels. In Google’s list of lodging types, B&Bs, guest houses, and farm stays sit with hotels, so everything below applies to them too. The Google rules below match its help pages as of September 2026. To use any of them, you need to have claimed and verified your profile, which is free.

Google Maps ranking for hotels: what counts

When someone searches for hotels on Google, the results are sorted by relevance by default. Google says dozens of factors count, including the words in the search and the hotel’s location, price, and ratings and reviews. Hotels can’t pay to change that order: paid links are shown separately, with an “Ads” label.

For local results in general, Google names three factors: relevance (how well your profile matches the search), distance (how far you are from the person searching), and prominence (how well known you are, which includes your reviews and the websites that link to you). Nobody can pay for a better local ranking.

You can’t move your property closer to Florence, but the rest is yours to work on: a profile that matches what guests search for, a steady flow of reviews, your own price next to your name, and a website that other sites link to. That last point is where your profile and your website’s SEO meet.

Seven Google Business Profile mistakes hotels make

Most of these cost nothing but time. Together they’re what optimizing a hotel profile means in practice.

1. A vague or wrong primary category

Google uses your categories to decide which searches you appear in. A generic category such as Lodging tells it very little. Pick the most specific one that fits: Hotel, Bed & breakfast, Guest house, or Farmstay for an agriturismo (it shows as Agriturismo if you manage the profile in Italian).

Two things are easy to miss. Categories say what you are, not what you have: a pool or free parking belongs in your amenities, not in a category. And if your restaurant or spa is open to people who aren’t staying with you, it can have its own profile. To check your category, open your profile, select Edit profile, then Edit next to Business category.

2. Wrong or missing basic details

A guest who calls a dead number, or follows the pin to the wrong farm, doesn’t book, and may leave a review about it. Google says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up in local results. Check four things:

• Phone: a number someone answers, ideally one that also works on WhatsApp.
• Website: a link that works and opens your home page or your booking page.
• Address and pin: exact to the meter. If you’re at the end of an unpaved road, guests arriving after dark trust the pin, not the directions in your email.
• Check-in and check-out times: hotels can’t set opening hours on Google (a hotel is open to its guests around the clock), so these take their place. Google also collects them from other sources, so check the ones it shows.

What about a description? Many hotel profiles have no description field at all. If yours has one, you get up to 750 characters on what you offer, with no links and no promotions. If not, guests read what Google shows instead: amenities, reviews, and summaries Google puts together.

3. Too few photos, or the wrong ones

Photos are the first thing people look at when they find you on Google, and what they compare when three places sit side by side on the map. If you upload none, your gallery fills with guests’ phone photos, taken in whatever light they had.

Aim for 20–30 good photos that cover every main space: the outside, the rooms, the bathrooms, the common areas, the pool, breakfast or the restaurant if you have one, and the view. Add new ones every two or three months so the seasons show: a vineyard in October looks nothing like the same vineyard in May. The sizes and formats Google accepts are in photo sizes for Airbnb, Booking.com, and Google Business Profile. If your gallery needs a proper reshoot, that’s my work as a hotel photographer in Tuscany.

4. Reviews without replies

Guests read your replies as closely as your stars, and Google says positive reviews and helpful replies can help a business stand out. Reply to every review, good and bad, within 24–48 hours, and write each reply yourself: the same “Thank you for your stay” under forty reviews reads like nobody is listening. Negative reviews need the most care, and I’ve collected negative hotel review response examples for exactly that.

5. Offer posts, or no posts at all

Hotels can publish posts on their profile (Google calls them updates). What they can’t publish are offers: Google doesn’t allow hotel posts that mention or link to deals, promotions, special offers, or discounts. The “10% off in November” post that works for a shop is not allowed on a hotel profile.

Post news instead: the pool opens, the grape harvest starts, the olive mill is pressing, a new room is ready, you’re hosting a dinner. Add a real photo every time. An update stays on your profile for six months before Google archives it, so you don’t need one every week.

6. Empty amenities

When a guest filters hotel results for a pool, free parking, or pets allowed, Google needs to know you have them. For hotels, amenities live in the Hotel details section of the profile, on a computer: search for each amenity, select it, and save. Google also gathers amenity information from other sources, so read what your profile shows today and correct anything that’s wrong. Be clear about accessibility, and update the list the day something changes.

7. Never opening the Performance report

Your profile’s Performance page shows how many people viewed it on Search and Maps, the search terms they used, and what they did next: calls, website clicks, requests for directions, and, for hotels, booking clicks (clicks on your booking link). It can also compare your prices with those of other hotels the same people looked at.

The search terms update once a month, so a monthly look is enough: note views, calls, website clicks, directions, and booking clicks in a spreadsheet, and after a season you’ll see which changes worked.

Google free booking links: your own price on your profile

When a guest opens your hotel on Google, a box shows prices for your rooms with links to book them. Paid links carry an “Ads” label. The free ones are listed under “All options,” and they come from Google’s free booking links program. Google charges nothing for the clicks or the bookings; ask whether your booking engine charges for the connection.

If your own website isn’t connected, any price on your profile comes from booking sites (OTAs) such as Booking.com and Expedia. The guest found you on Google, on your own profile, and books through them, so you pay commission on a guest you had already won. Once you’re connected, your site appears in the same box with an “Official site” badge, which Google gives to hotel owners and their booking partners and never to OTAs.

Since July 30, 2025, hotels can no longer enter their rates in Google Business Profile themselves. Google asks them to work with a partner: a central reservation system, a booking engine, or another connectivity partner. In practice, ask the company behind your booking engine or channel manager three things. Is it a Google partner? Is your free booking link active? Does it send guests to your own booking page?

What about vacation rentals?

A vacation home or holiday rental on its own can’t have a Business Profile: Google lists “rental or for-sale properties such as vacation homes” as not eligible. A rental agency with an office where it meets guests can have one, for the office.

Vacation rentals reach Google through its vacation rental listings instead, and those take only homes run by professional property managers: individual owners and peer-to-peer rentals aren’t eligible. Many of Google’s partners there are channel managers and rental software: if you use one, ask whether it sends your homes to Google.

One profile, two languages

If you run a property in Italy, your guests may search in English, German, Dutch, or Italian, but each property gets one profile. Don’t create a second one for another language: Google allows one profile per location. Here’s how each part behaves:

• Name: your real name, once. Google doesn’t allow the same name repeated in two languages, even if your sign shows both, or keywords added to it.
• Category, amenities, and check-in times: these are Google’s own fields, so guests see them in their own language.
• Photos: they need no translation.
• Reviews: they arrive in many languages, and Google Maps often offers readers a translation.
• Your own words (posts, review replies, a description if you have one): write in the language most of your guests use, or in both, in short, plain sentences that survive machine translation.
• Website link: you get one. Point it to a page where a foreign guest can switch to English in one tap.

Being found in two languages goes beyond the profile: your website, your listings, and your address details have to agree everywhere. That’s the subject of local SEO for hotels in Italy.

A 30-minute check-up

You can fix the worst of this today:

1. Check the primary category (2 minutes).
2. Check the phone number, website link, pin, and check-in times (4 minutes).
3. Search your property on Google and open the prices: is your own site there? (1 minute)
4. Upload at least 10 good photos (10 minutes).
5. Reply to your last five reviews (10 minutes).
6. Fill in the missing amenities in Hotel details (3 minutes).

Where your profile fits

The profile works best when it isn’t on its own. It sends guests to your website, so the site has to load fast and take a booking. It shows the same place as your Booking.com and Airbnb listings, so the photos should match. And it lives on reviews, so asking for one should be part of how you say goodbye to guests.

That’s why I treat the profile as part of SEO for hotels, not as a form you fill in once: photos, website, reviews, and local listings, with one point of contact. If you’re deciding what to fix first across all of them, my guide to marketing a small hotel puts the steps in order.