For a business that trades in a place, the Google Business Profile is doing more work than the website, the Instagram account and the brochure combined. The 2025 numbers make that plain.
Bookings made directly from profiles rose 13%. Direction requests rose 34%. Food orders rose 78%. Impressions rose 14%. And here is the detail that matters most: clicks to the website rose only 3%. People are finding the business, deciding, and acting inside the profile. They are not visiting the website to think about it first.
Close to half of all Google searches are for something nearby. Verified businesses are trusted more. None of this is new. What is new is how much of the customer’s decision now happens on that one page.
What it means for a South African business
If you run a restaurant, a wine farm, a guesthouse, a salon, a practice or a trade, your profile is your storefront. A customer standing in Paarl with a phone in hand is choosing between you and the place next door based on photos, hours, reviews and whether the booking button works. A beautiful website they never reach doesn’t enter into it.
What we’d do
Treat the profile as a live page, not a listing. Fresh photos every month, taken properly. Hours accurate, including public holidays. Every review answered within a few days, warmly, in your own voice. Products, services and a booking or ordering link kept current. A short post each week, because the profile has a feed and almost nobody uses it. Then measure direction requests and calls, because those are the enquiries that walk through the door.
Data check: across the profiles we manage, direction requests moved by X% and calls by Y% over the year.
Data: 2026 Social Media Study, 39.7 million posts across 1.06 million business accounts, 2025 compared with 2024.
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