Your Church's Google Business Profile Is Probably Wrong

Search your church's name on Google right now, on your phone, in an incognito window so it's not personalized to you. Look at the box that appears on the right, or at the top of a local search — the address, the hours, the phone number, the photos. There's a decent chance something in there is wrong, outdated, or was never filled in at all. This happens to churches constantly, because nobody thinks of it as "their" listing to maintain — it feels like Google's, not the church's.

It's also, per the previous piece on how people actually find a church online, often the very first thing someone checks. Getting it right is low-effort and high-impact in a way few other outreach tasks are.

What a Google Business Profile actually controls

This is the listing that shows up when someone searches your church's name or searches for churches in your area on Google Search or Google Maps. It's separate from your website — Google pulls the listing's own information first, and a lot of people never click through to the website at all if the listing itself answers their question.

• Name, address and phone number.
• Hours — which for a church means service times, and this field is very easy to leave outdated after a schedule change.
• Photos — often the only visual impression someone gets before deciding to look further.
• Reviews — visible to anyone searching, whether or not the church ever asked for them.
• A website link and a "call" or "directions" button, which is often how someone takes the next step.

Common mistakes worth checking today

How to fix it

Why this is worth doing before a bigger marketing push

It's tempting to focus energy on more visible things — a redesigned website, a social media push, better sermon video. All of that is worth doing, but none of it matters if the free, high-intent listing someone finds first has the wrong service time on it. Fixing a Google Business Profile takes less than an hour and has no ongoing cost, which makes it one of the highest-return tasks on any church's digital to-do list. See church social media metrics for what's actually worth measuring once the basics like this are handled.

The photos are doing more work than you think

Most church profiles carry one exterior shot of the building, taken from across the car park, often in winter. A visitor deciding whether to come on Sunday is trying to answer questions that photo cannot: what do people wear, is there anywhere for my children, will I be the only person my age, where do I actually walk in. Photographs answer those faster than any paragraph of copy will.

• The entrance people should actually use, photographed from the car park so it is recognisable on arrival.
• The car park itself, including any overflow, plus accessible spaces.
• The room set up before a service, so the size of it is not a surprise.
• Children’s check-in, if you have one — this is the single most common unspoken question from families.
• People, not just architecture. A room with nobody in it reads as a room nobody comes to.

Replace them once a year. Google shows recency, and a profile whose newest photo is four years old quietly says the same thing an out-of-date service time does. If you already produce sermon clips each week, you have more usable footage than you think — a still pulled from a clip is a real photograph of a real service.

Reviews, and why churches are strange about them

Churches tend to treat reviews as either irrelevant or slightly grubby, and then wonder why the only three reviews on the profile are from a disgruntled former member, someone who attended a funeral in 2019, and a person who confused the building with the hall next door. You do not need to run a review campaign. You do need to not be absent.

Reply to every review, including the difficult ones, briefly and without defensiveness. A short, kind reply to a critical review is read by far more prospective visitors than the review itself, and it tells them more about the church than any description field can. Never argue, never explain at length, and never reply to a pastoral matter in public — offer a way to talk instead.

The fields almost every church leaves empty

The description field is the one most worth rewriting. It is usually inherited from whoever set the profile up and reads like a statement of faith. That has its place, but it is not what someone standing in their kitchen on a Saturday night is looking for. Tell them what time to arrive, what happens for the first ten minutes, and what to do with their kids.

Keeping it accurate going forward

The failure mode here is rarely a one-time mistake — it's drift over time as staff turns over and nobody inherits the responsibility. Assign the Google Business Profile to a specific role (often whoever owns the website or social accounts) with a standing reminder to check it every few months, especially after any schedule or staffing change. It's a small line item, but it's one of the few outreach tasks where the fix is genuinely permanent once it's correct — until the next change.