What to Prepare Before a First Consultation

A first consultation about your Google Business Profile can go one of two ways. Either you spend the hour explaining your business from scratch, or you walk in with the right details and leave with a clear action plan. The difference is preparation.

Most owners we speak with are not SEO people. They run a plumbing company, a hair salon, or a guesthouse in Durban. They know their trade, not the inside of Google's dashboard. That is exactly why a little homework before the call matters so much.

What to have on hand

Before the session, gather the basics about your current setup. You do not need a spreadsheet, but a few notes help. Here is what we usually ask for:

• Your business name and physical address exactly as it appears on your invoices, signage, and any existing online listings. Inconsistencies here are the most common reason local rankings stall.
• Your service area. Do you serve a single suburb, a whole city, or multiple towns? This changes how we set up your profile and which categories matter.
• Access to your Google Business Profile. If you have already claimed it, log in before the call. If not, we will walk through claiming it together.
• A list of your main services or products. Keep it to five or six. We will use these to decide which categories and attributes to select.
• Your current review count and rating. A rough idea is fine. This tells us whether your focus should be on generating new reviews or responding to existing ones.

Questions you should be ready to answer

Some of the most useful conversations start with simple questions. Think about these before the call:

• Who is your typical customer, and how do they usually find you?
• What do people search for when they need your service?
• Have you noticed any patterns in the reviews you receive, good or bad?
• How much time can you realistically spend on your online presence each week?

The last question matters more than most people expect. A consultation can give you a great plan, but if you only have thirty minutes a week to act on it, we need to design the steps around that constraint.

What happens next

By the end of the session, you should have a short list of concrete actions. Not a twenty-page report, but a few things you can tick off in the coming days. That might be updating your opening hours, adding a service description, or setting up a simple review request routine.

Bring your questions, bring your login details, and bring a rough sense of what you want to improve. The rest we can figure out together.