Chapter 17: Managing Google Business Profiles for Clients

Managing your own Google Business Profile is one thing.

Managing somebody else's is different.

The work itself may be familiar. We still need accurate information. We still need Pictures, Posts and Praise. We still need to monitor changes and measure what happens.

But now there is another person involved.

The client.

That changes the management problem because the agency does not control the business.

The client knows when the opening hours change. The client knows when a service is discontinued, when a new employee starts, when an offer changes and when something important happens inside the business. The client has the photographs. The client has the genuine customer relationships that create review opportunities. The client may also need to approve certain content before it is published.

The agency can manage the Business Profile, while the client supplies the information that only the business itself can know.

That makes successful client management depend on something we have only touched on so far:

Communication.

17.1 The Agency Is an Authorised Representative

The first principle is simple.

Google allows authorised representatives to manage Business Profiles on behalf of businesses and places clear responsibilities on them. Authorised representatives must have the business owner's express consent, keep the owner informed about the actions being taken on the profile and ensure the business owner retains ownership or co-ownership of the Business Profile.[1][2]

That fits the ownership principle we established earlier in the book.

The business should retain appropriate control of its own profile.

The agency should have the access it needs to do the work.

The ownership structure should also make the relationship straightforward if the agency and client later part company.

Google's third-party policy goes even further and recommends that, after a profile is created for a client, the business owner is made an owner and the third party manages it as a manager. If a client already has a Business Profile, Google's advice is to ask for manager access rather than owner access.[2]

The default relationship is straightforward.

The client owns the business.

The agency manages the work.

Set the ownership up properly at the beginning so the business retains appropriate control throughout the relationship.

It is much easier than untangling it later.

The same discipline applies inside the agency. Individual members of staff should use their own access rather than shared passwords, and access should be removed when somebody no longer works on the account.

A Business Profile is an important business asset.

Treat access accordingly.

17.2 Onboarding Is Where Most Future Problems Begin

Good onboarding removes ambiguity before the work starts.

Collect the information needed to represent the business accurately, establish who can approve changes and agree how the continuing work will operate.

I want to understand the business I am representing. I want to know the correct business name, how and where the business operates, which locations are genuine, what the opening hours are, which services it actually provides and which categories accurately describe it. I want to know the correct telephone number and website destination, who owns the profile, who already has access, who at the business can approve important changes and who should be contacted if something goes wrong.

I also want to know how the continuing work is supposed to happen.

Where will photographs come from?

How will the agency learn about new offers, events and business changes?

How will review requests fit into the real customer journey?

Which decisions can the agency make under the agreed service, and which ones need the client?

This creates the master business record and the working relationship around it. Once that exists, we have something to manage against instead of turning every future decision into another email.

"Are you still open until five on Saturday?"

"Do you still offer this service?"

"Is this telephone number correct?"

"Can we use this photograph?"

"Is this offer still running?"

That gets old very quickly for both sides.

Collect the truth properly at the beginning.

Then create a process for keeping it current.

17.3 The Client Is Often the Dependency

Some of the work depends on information only the client can provide.

You need fresh photographs.

The client has not supplied them.

A post is ready.

The client has not approved it.

You want to communicate a new offer.

Nobody has told you what the offer is.

Christmas opening hours are approaching.

The client has not confirmed them.

You have built a review-request process.

The customer information never arrives.

So the account manager sends an email.

Nothing.

Another email.

Nothing.

Then somebody calls.

The client says:

"Sorry. Completely forgot. I'll send it over."

They do not.

A week later, the account manager chases again.

Multiply that across fifty clients and a substantial part of the agency's Google Business Profile service becomes asking people to send things.

That is a terrible use of skilled staff.

It is also why client management is really dependency management.

The agency needs to know what it is waiting for, who it is waiting for and what work cannot move until that dependency is resolved.

The management job is to make those dependencies visible and the process easy to complete.

17.4 Make It Easy for Clients to Give You What You Need

If clients repeatedly fail to do something, look at the process they are being asked to follow.

Imagine receiving an email saying:

"Can you send us some new content for your Google Business Profile?"

What does that mean?

What content?

How much?

About what?

Where should it be sent?

What happens next?

Now compare that with a specific request for recent photographs of the team, premises or completed work, with one obvious place to upload them.

That is easier.

The same applies to approval.

Show the client the post that needs approval in one obvious place.

Let them approve it.

Or let them change it and approve the revised version.

The less unnecessary thinking involved in an administrative task, the more likely it is to get done.

This matters because Google Business Profile management is rarely the client's main priority.

The restaurant owner is running a restaurant.

The dentist is running a dental practice.

The locksmith is dealing with customers.

The accountant is doing accounts.

They did not wake up this morning excited to send their agency four photographs of the reception area.

We need the material.

They have the material.

Our job is to make supplying it as painless as possible.

This is exactly why we created the White-Label Client Portal inside GBPly.

Each client can have a profile-specific portal carrying the agency's branding, with no need for the client to create a GBPly account. The agency decides which parts of the portal the client can see and use.[3]

If image upload is enabled, the client can upload photographs there.

If post approval is enabled, they can approve, reject or edit pending posts there.

If the agency wants the client involved in Praise, the portal can accept customer contact details for automated review requests and can expose review tools and review responses where appropriate.[3]

The client has one obvious place to participate in the service.

That removes a great deal of friction before any automation even begins.

17.5 Keep Approval Moving

Agree the approval boundary with the client. Some will want to approve routine work, while others will give the agency authority to handle it within the agreed service.

Certain things may always need explicit approval: a major offer, a sensitive announcement, an important change to business information or a response to a serious complaint.

Other routine work may sit comfortably inside the authority already granted to the agency.

The important thing is that both sides understand the line.

The approval process should protect the client while keeping routine work moving.

The White-Label Client Portal gives GBPly a cleaner approval route. Pending posts can be shown directly to the client, and the client can approve, reject or edit them without leaving the portal.[3]

GBPly can also send recurring portal reminders on a 7, 14 or 28-day cycle where the agency wants the system to nudge the client back to outstanding work.[3]

That keeps approval with the client while taking the manual chase out of the agency’s workflow.

17.6 Praise Has to Connect With the Real Customer Journey

Praise becomes particularly interesting when an agency manages it because the agency normally does not own the customer relationship.

The client does.

That means the review process has to connect with what actually happens inside the business.

When has the customer genuinely experienced enough of the service to be asked for feedback?

How does that customer enter the request process?

Who is responsible for making sure the information reaches the system?

For some businesses, the answer may be an integration through the Review Request API.

For others, the client may periodically add customer email addresses or telephone numbers through the White-Label Client Portal.[3]

GBPly can then handle the repetitive request process through its review tools.

The policy standard from Chapter 13 still applies. The customers must be genuine, the request must remain neutral and the process must comply with Google's review policies.

Automation makes that legitimate process easier to run consistently.

The same principle applies once reviews arrive. Google requires third parties to have the client's explicit approval before responding to reviews on their behalf, and verbal consent is not sufficient.[2]

Even with that approval in place, some replies are straightforward and others are not. A serious allegation in a negative review may still need the client's direct involvement before anybody publishes a response.

The White-Label Client Portal can allow the client to see recent reviews and reply directly to Google, with AI-generated suggestions available where useful.[3]

Sensitive reviews may need direct client involvement, so define the approval relationship before that situation arrives.

17.7 The Agency Needs to Know When Something Changes

Managing somebody else's Business Profile also means other people may change it.

The owner may make an edit.

A member of staff may make an edit.

Google may update information.

Somebody with old access may still be involved.

And unless the agency notices, it can continue managing the profile while assuming the information it approved months ago is still live.

This is where Profile Guard becomes particularly useful.

Once a protected baseline has been established, Profile Guard compares the current profile data with that snapshot whenever the data is synced. If an important field changes, the manager can see the previous value and the new one.[4]

The manager can then decide what the change means.

If the client genuinely changed the opening hours, acknowledge the change and make sure the master business record and website follow where necessary.

If the change is wrong, the protected value can be pushed back to Google.

If the alert needs no action, it can be ignored.[4]

The important thing is that the agency knows the change happened and can manage it accordingly.

17.8 Build a Repeatable Service

When an agency has five clients, an organised person can keep a surprising amount in their head.

At twenty, that gets harder.

At fifty, memory becomes a liability.

At a hundred, a service built around individual account managers remembering what every client needs becomes fragile.

The system should preserve human judgement for the work that actually requires it.

The agency needs a repeatable operating standard for bringing a profile up to scratch, establishing the source of truth, setting up monitoring, collecting pictures, creating and approving posts, running the review process and measuring what happens.

The exact decisions will still differ by client.

The process should not.

That is where GBP Expert becomes useful.

GBP Expert gives the team a structured way to review Profile Completeness rather than relying on every member of staff remembering the same checks from memory.[5]

The point is to give every client a dependable starting standard while keeping the decisions specific to the business.

Then the people managing the account can spend more of their time on the decisions that actually require experience.

17.9 The Client Needs to See the Service

This may be the most overlooked part of agency Google Business Profile management.

The client also needs to understand that the work is happening.

Imagine paying an agency every month and seeing almost nothing.

You do not see the checks.

You do not see the small corrections.

You do not see the pictures being scheduled.

You do not see the posts moving through approval.

You do not see the review requests.

You do not see the monitoring.

Then the invoice arrives.

Eventually you ask:

"What have you actually done this month?"

That question does not necessarily mean the agency has delivered a poor service.

It may mean the agency has delivered an invisible one.

The White-Label Client Portal helps solve that problem because it gives the client one branded place to participate in the work and, where the agency chooses, see selected parts of what is happening.

The portal can expose performance statistics, scheduled images and posts, recent reviews, review responses, Rank Replay and Insights alongside the actions the client needs to take.[3]

The client can see the relevant parts of the service without needing to sit beside the account manager while the work is done.

That matters commercially.

Clients find it much easier to value work they can see.

17.10 Show the Work and the Result

Operational activity and commercial outcomes are two different parts of the client story, so I like reporting them separately.

Here is the work we completed.

Here is what happened to visibility and customer activity.

Put them next to each other and let the evidence show how both changed over time.

Rank Tracker and Rank Replay are useful here because they let the agency show how observed local visibility moved over time alongside the management record.

Performance information can add the customer-action side.

The management record adds the delivery side.

Together, they make the conversation much more credible.

Sometimes the story will be excellent.

Sometimes progress will be slow.

Sometimes visibility will decline.

Show it anyway.

A credible agency needs to know what is happening and have a sensible process for deciding what happens next, including when progress is slow or visibility declines.

17.11 Build the Record as the Work Happens

A better agency process creates the management record as the work happens, so the monthly review starts with evidence already in the system.

Pictures arrive and move into the schedule.

Posts move through approval.

Reviews arrive and get managed.

Profile changes are detected.

Rank scans continue building history.

Performance data accumulates.

By the time the monthly review comes around, the evidence is already there.

That lets the conversation become much more useful.

What changed?

What are we seeing?

Is anything stuck?

What do we need from the client?

What needs attention next?

That is management.

A PDF full of charts can support that conversation.

It should not replace it.

17.12 Managing Clients Is Really Managing Dependencies

Google Business Profile management for clients is a network of dependencies, not simply a collection of tasks.

The agency cannot publish new location photographs until somebody supplies them.

It cannot accurately change opening hours until somebody confirms them.

It cannot communicate an offer it has never been told about.

It cannot run a legitimate review-request process without a route for genuine customers to enter that process.

And it should not publish a sensitive response to a serious complaint without knowing what actually happened.

Scaling the service means managing those dependencies without requiring a human being to remember every one of them.

This is why workflows, reminders, approvals, client uploads, monitoring and centralised management matter.

They make the client relationship easier to operate.

And when the system works properly, something important happens.

The agency stops spending so much of its time administering Google Business Profile management.

It can spend more of its time actually managing Google Business Profiles.

That is the goal:

Appropriate automation.

Let the client provide the things only the client can provide.

Let GBPly handle the predictable, repetitive movement around that information.

Let the agency make the decisions it is being paid to make.

And keep a record that connects the whole service.

That gives us a scalable client-management system while keeping each client specific to the real business.

But even with a good system, things still go wrong.

Profiles change unexpectedly.

Ownership gets disputed.

Duplicates appear.

Verification fails.

Profiles can be restricted or suspended.

And when that happens, the worst thing an agency can do is panic and start making random changes.

The next chapter is about what to do when the normal management process breaks.

Notes

1. Google Business Profile Help, “Business eligibility and ownership guidelines”, https://support.google.com/business/answer/13763036?hl=en-GB. Checked 3 September 2026.
2. Google Business Profile Help, “Business Profile third-party policies”, https://support.google.com/business/answer/7353941?hl=en-GB. Checked 3 September 2026.
3. GBPly User Guide, “Client Portal”, https://gbply.net/user-guide/client-portal. Checked 3 September 2026.
4. GBPly User Guide, “Profile Guard”, https://gbply.net/user-guide/profile-guard. Checked 3 September 2026.
5. GBPly User Guide, “GBP Expert”, https://gbply.net/user-guide/gbp-expert. Checked 3 September 2026.