The GBP Loop - Mike Martin on Google Business Profiles

Fill the profile, mirror it to your website and citations, then pictures, posts and praise, every month. That is the GBP loop, and Mike Martin, founder of GBPly, says staying on it beats 95% of Google Business Profiles because nobody else stays consistent. He joins Jeremy Rivera on Unscripted SEO to explain why GBP work "doesn't have an end date."

Mike started as a locksmith and built his own websites when paid ads got too expensive. At one point he ran around 3,000 lead-gen sites. They kept ranking while the leads kept falling, so this year he let 2,500 domain names go and moved his business into Google Business Profiles. Read the full episode recap.

On verification, Mike starts with the website and citations, not the profile. A service area business that shows its address breaks Google's guidelines for representing your business, and video verification from home becomes near impossible. He would rather have 10 verified, manually created citations than 100 from a mass citation tool, because Google can now apply a suggested edit to your profile within four days if you miss the notice. Jeremy explains what the five data aggregators actually do, and SEO Arcade has a guide to building local citations that covers the rest.

They also get into independent practitioner profiles (a clinic with five physios now runs six profiles, and a law firm with 15 lawyers could run 16), why Mike thinks mirroring and the website as an entity matter more than its link profile, how listing his books on Google Books and setting up an IMDb profile made his AI overview fill in within 24 hours, Google's new Ask Maps, and why Gemini gets Google's own Business Profile documentation wrong.

Jeremy shares his dark clicks study: across 38 sites and four million Search Console clicks, the average site saw 64% of its clicks arrive with no query attached. Mike's rule for AI-written GBP posts is simple. Let AI draft, have a human edit and approve, and skip AI-generated images. Find his books at mikemartin.uk, his videos on his YouTube channel, and try GBPly for 10 free Google Maps rank scans a month.