Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is one of the most underleveraged SEO assets for travel brands. For tour operators with physical offices or departure locations, a well-optimised profile improves local search visibility, builds trust with prospective customers, and provides a direct channel for showcasing recent activity and customer reviews. Here’s how to make the most of it.
Fill out all the fields
The more complete your Business Profile, the more Google has to work with when matching your listing to relevant searches. Fill in every available field: business name, address, phone number, website, business hours, business category, and service areas. For tour operators, the business category and service area fields are particularly important — choose categories that reflect your specialist focus (Tour Operator, Travel Agency) and define the geographic markets you serve. What we’ve found is that incomplete profiles consistently underperform in local and branded search results compared to fully populated ones.
Use your best photos and videos
Business Profile photos appear in Google Search and Maps results. For travel brands, visual content is a direct trust signal — a profile with high-quality images of your tours, destinations, and team tells prospective customers far more about what you offer than one with a generic office photo or no images at all. Add photos of your tours in action, destination highlights, and your team where possible. In our experience, profiles with strong visual content generate significantly higher profile views and website clicks than those without.
Share key updates and special offers
Google Posts allow you to publish updates, offers, and news directly to your Business Profile. These appear in your Knowledge Panel in search results and provide a timely, visible channel for promoting seasonal departures, limited availability tours, or early booking offers. For tour operators, we recommend scheduling posts around key booking windows — January and February for summer departures, October for ski and winter sun. Posts expire after seven days so require a regular publishing cadence to stay current.
How to create a new Google My Business post:
Log in to your Google Business Profile Manager, select your profile, and navigate to the “Add Update” section. Choose the post type (What’s New, Offer, or Event), add your image and description, include a CTA button where relevant, and publish. For travel brands, using an image of the specific tour or destination being promoted consistently improves post engagement over generic or branded imagery.
Encourage customer and employee reviews
Reviews are one of the most significant trust factors for travel businesses, and your Google Business Profile is one of the highest-visibility places they appear. A consistent stream of recent, detailed reviews from genuine customers — describing their actual experience on your tours — builds credibility that advertising cannot replicate. Clients often ask us how to generate more reviews, and the answer is straightforward: ask for them, promptly, after a trip. A post-departure email with a direct link to your Google review page is the simplest mechanism, and it works consistently well for operators who use it.
Respond to customer reviews
Responding to reviews — both positive and negative — demonstrates that your business is active, engaged, and takes customer feedback seriously. For travel brands, this is particularly important: prospective customers reading your reviews will also read your responses. A thoughtful, professional response to a critical review often does more for trust than the review itself. We tend to see operators who respond consistently to all reviews generate better overall ratings over time than those who engage selectively or not at all.
How to respond to reviews through Google My Business:
In Google Business Profile Manager, navigate to the Reviews section. You can respond directly to each review from here. Keep responses professional, thank reviewers by name where possible, and for negative reviews, acknowledge the issue and offer to continue the conversation offline — don’t attempt to resolve disputes publicly in the review response itself.