A local service business we reviewed has 65 reviews at a 5.0 average. For a company that earns work by appointment, that is a genuinely strong position and years of real work behind it.
Its Google Business Profile had no website address attached. The field was empty. The company has a live website with a separate page for each service it offers, and every person who found the business through Google Maps saw none of it.
That is one field in a dashboard. It took under a minute to identify and would take under a minute to fix. Until it is fixed, the business’s best marketing asset dead-ends.
Do I still need a website if I have a Google Business Profile?
Yes, because they do different jobs. The Google profile gets you found and shows a short summary that Google controls. The website is where you explain the work, show proof, and let people contact you on your terms.
The distinction matters more than it sounds. On your profile, Google decides what shows, in what order, next to which competitors, with your reviews and photos arranged to its preference. It can add attributes you did not write and questions you did not answer. You are a tenant.
On your website you decide what a customer sees first, how the work is explained, which job you want more of, and what happens when someone makes contact. For a business trying to move toward better-paying work, that control is the whole point. A profile can tell someone you exist. It cannot argue for the job you actually want.
Why is my Google profile not sending anyone to my website?
The most common cause is that the website field on the profile is empty. It is one field in the Google Business Profile dashboard, and it is easy to leave blank when the listing was created years ago, set up by someone who has left, or generated automatically by Google before the owner ever claimed it.
The second most common cause is that the field points somewhere stale: a previous website, a Facebook page, a domain that expired, or a link with tracking parameters that now breaks. Check what is actually in the field rather than assuming, and open it on a phone to confirm where it lands.
This is worth checking even when everything appears healthy. The business above had five stars, 65 reviews, and photos. Nothing about the profile looked broken. The gap only appears when you go looking for it.
Does my Google Business Profile need to match my website?
The business name, address, and phone number should be identical on both, character for character where you can manage it. Google uses that agreement to decide it is looking at one real business rather than several uncertain ones.
This has become more consequential than it used to be. AI assistants answering local questions pull from the same underlying records, and they are less forgiving than a person. A human reads “Suite 4” and “Ste. 4” as the same place. A matching system may not, and conflicting details make a business look less certain than a competitor whose records agree.
We reviewed one firm whose second location listed a Pennsylvania city with a New Jersey state abbreviation, a Pennsylvania ZIP code, and map coordinates on the New Jersey side of the river, while four different directories each showed a different ZIP. No amount of website copy resolves a conflict like that. It has to be fixed at the record level first.
Which should I fix first?
Fix whichever one is breaking the path between the customer and you.
Work through it in this order, because each step decides whether the next one matters:
- Does the profile exist, is it claimed, and is the category right? If not, nothing downstream gets seen.
- Does the website field contain a working link to your current site? This is the cheapest fix with the largest gap between effort and effect.
- Do the name, address, and phone match your website exactly?
- Does the page that link lands on actually answer what the searcher wanted, or does it dump them on a generic homepage?
- Only then: is the website itself doing its job once they arrive?
Most businesses start at the last item because it feels like the real work. The first four take an afternoon combined, and skipping them means the website improvements are made for an audience that never reaches the site.
What to check this week
Open your Google Business Profile on a phone, not the dashboard, and look at it the way a customer would. Tap the website button. See where it goes.
Then compare the name, address, and phone against your own site, character for character. Differences you would call trivial are the ones a machine treats as two different businesses.