The honest answer: less often than you have been told
Advice to “stay active” usually means post weekly, add photos constantly and keep the profile busy. Most of that is low value for a local service business.
What matters is accuracy, not activity. A profile that is correct and answered is worth more than one that is busy and slightly wrong, for the reason covered in Lesson 2: Google Business Profile for AI search: engines read these fields as facts, and wrong facts propagate.
Here is a cadence you can actually keep.
Cadence by element
| Element | How often | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Hours | Whenever they change, plus two weeks before every holiday | Wrong hours cause a wasted trip and a bad review |
| Review replies | Weekly, or within a few days of arrival | Replies add readable context and change how a complaint reads |
| Services list | Quarterly, or when you add or drop a service | Keeps profile and site describing the same business |
| Primary category | Only when the business genuinely changes | Churn prevents a stable association forming |
| Photos | When something real changes | New premises, vehicle or team, not a monthly quota |
| Posts | Optional, monthly at most | Low retrieval value, some value for human visitors |
| Contact details | Immediately on change, then audit downstream | A ported number spreads fast through aggregators |
| Full listing audit | Twice a year | Catches drift you did not cause |
The 20-minute monthly routine
Put it in the calendar on the same day each month.
- Check hours against next month’s calendar. Public holidays, planned closures, seasonal changes. Enter special hours now rather than the day before.
- Call your own number. Thirty seconds, and it catches a broken diversion or a ported line before a customer does.
- Reply to any unanswered reviews. Including the awkward ones. The guide on asking for reviews compliantly covers how to handle a negative one.
- Re-read the services list. Remove anything you no longer offer. Add anything new, and make sure there is a page on your site to match.
- Glance at the Q and A section. Answer anything unanswered, and correct anything wrong.
That is the whole job in most months.
Twice a year, do the longer pass
Once every six months, spend an hour on the full listing audit described in the NAP consistency guide: search your name, your phone number and any old address, and check what other sites are saying about you. Drift happens without your involvement, and six months is long enough for a stale record to resurface and short enough to catch it before it spreads.
What is busywork
Posting weekly because a tool nags you. Uploading stock-looking photos to hit a quota. Rewriting your business description repeatedly. Adding secondary categories you do not serve. Chasing new directory listings after the useful ones are done.
None of these are harmful in small doses. All of them consume time that would be better spent rewriting one service page so it can actually be quoted, which is the work in Lesson 3.
Around holidays and business changes
Two moments justify breaking the routine.
Holidays. Enter special hours at least two weeks ahead for every closure and every reduced-hours day. This is the single highest-value non-routine update you can make.
Business changes. A move, a number change, a new service line, a change of ownership. Update the profile first, then your website, then the aggregators, then the directories. Expect a couple of months for everything downstream to settle, and re-run your prompt test after it does, using the method in Lesson 7.
Signs you are over-maintaining
There is a failure mode at the other end, and it is common among owners who take this seriously.
You post weekly and nothing changes. Posts are low-value for retrieval. If you enjoy writing them, keep going. If you are doing it because a tool nags you, stop and spend the time on a service page.
You rewrite your business description every few months. It is not a lever. Write it once, clearly, and leave it.
You add and remove categories looking for an effect. Category churn prevents a stable association forming, and it is one of the few maintenance behaviours that can actively hurt.
You upload photos to a schedule rather than when something changes. A monthly photo quota produces a gallery of nothing in particular.
You check your rankings daily. Measurement belongs on a monthly cadence, as Lesson 7 sets out. Daily checking measures noise and invites pointless changes.
A useful test: if you cannot state what a maintenance task changes for a customer or for an engine, it is probably busywork. Accurate hours change whether someone drives over. A reply to a bad review changes how the complaint reads. A seventh photo of the same van does not.
What good looks like after six months
A profile that has not been fiddled with, but is correct. Hours right, including the public holiday coming up. Every review from the last six months answered. Services matching what you actually sell. One primary category, unchanged. A handful of real photos.
That is a well-maintained profile, and it takes about four hours a year.