Business Profile

Your business profile is the data Google shows on Maps and Search — hours, categories, description, services, contact info, and the rest of the listing your customers actually see. GMBMantra mirrors it locally so you can edit everything in one place, and writes the changes back to your Google Business Profile via the Business Information API. The editor lives at /profile.

Editing Your Profile

1. 1

   Open /profile and pick the location

   The profile editor at /profile is scoped to whichever location is selected in the top-bar location picker. If you manage more than one listing, switch the picker first — every field on the page applies to that one location, and saves go back to that one Google Business Profile.

2. 2

   Pick a field and edit it inline

   Each section is its own card: business name (title), primary category (categories.primaryCategory), secondary categories (categories.additionalCategories), description (profile.description), phone (phoneNumbers.primaryPhone), website (websiteUri), address (storefrontAddress), regular hours (regularHours), special hours (specialHours), services (serviceItems), and link/attribute fields (WhatsApp, social URLs). Edit the field directly — most save inline; hours and special hours have their own editors.

3. 3

   Save the changes

   Hit Save. GMBMantra collects the dirty fields, transforms them into Google's nested API shape, and PATCHes /v1/locations/{id} with the right updateMask (one of title, profile, phoneNumbers, websiteUri, storefrontAddress, regularHours, specialHours, categories). Attribute changes (WhatsApp, social URLs) go to a separate /v1/locations/{id}/attributes endpoint with an attributeMask. Both calls run in parallel.

4. 4

   Confirm the sync

   On success, the local mirror in our database updates with the same values, and the editor refetches to show what Google actually accepted. Most simple fields (hours, description, phone, website) propagate to your public listing within a few minutes. If Google rejects a field — bad format, policy violation, or a category that needs review — the response surfaces a fieldViolations list and you'll see the specific reason against that field in the editor.

Key Concepts

Regular hours vs special hours

regularHours is your weekly schedule — each day accepts one or more open/close ranges, including split shifts (open for lunch, close, reopen for dinner). specialHours is the override layer: specific dates with their own open/close, or a date marked closed. Use special hours for public holidays, one-off closures, or seasonal changes; regular hours stay untouched. Both push back to Google on the same save.

Primary category vs secondary categories

Every Google Business Profile has exactly one primary category (categories.primaryCategory) — that's the single biggest signal to Google about what kind of business you are, and it directly affects which "near me" searches you show up in. Secondary categories (categories.additionalCategories) are everything else you also do; you can add several. The editor resolves your display-name pick (e.g. "Italian restaurant") to Google's canonical gcid via the Business Information categories API before sending the patch, so you don't have to know the internal ID.

Description

profile.description is the free-text paragraph Google shows on your listing — what you do, what makes you different, who you serve. It's saved as part of the profile updateMask field. Keep it factual: Google strips marketing fluff and rejects descriptions that read like ad copy.

Services

Services (serviceItems) are the list of things you actually offer — "Haircut", "Oil change", "Wedding photography" — and each can have a price and a description. They sync back to Google through the serviceItems updateMask on the same locations endpoint, and are what populates the "Services" tab on your Maps listing.

Attributes (WhatsApp, social URLs)

Some fields aren't part of the main location object — they live on a separate Attributes resource. WhatsApp number, Facebook URL, Instagram URL, Twitter URL, and YouTube URL are all attributes (attributes/url_whatsapp, attributes/url_facebook, etc.). The editor handles this transparently: when you save, attribute changes go to /v1/locations/{id}/attributes with an attributeMask while the rest of the profile goes to the main locations endpoint.

What's read-only

A few things the editor surfaces aren't editable from inside GMBMantra: the verification status (metadata.verified) is controlled by Google's verification flow at business.google.com, the review summary (total reviews, average rating, response rate) is computed from synced review data, and the location identifiers (gmbLocationName, gmbLocationId, gmbAccountId) are assigned by Google at creation. If you need to change something that the editor doesn't expose a field for, email support@gmbmantra.ai.

Frequently Asked

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