If someone has offered to manage your Google Business Profile for a monthly fee, start with something Google says plainly: "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google" (sourced from Google Business Profile Help). Nobody can sell you a spot in the map results.
What a Google Business Profile management service can sell you is time and judgement. Here's how to tell which parts are worth paying for, which parts you can keep doing yourself in a few minutes a week, and which parts are padding.
Done once: the setup
Google says local results are based on relevance, distance and prominence (sourced from the same Google help page). You can't change your distance from a customer, but the setup is where relevance gets decided. A proper one covers:
Verification, with you as the owner. If you're not sure you are, check who actually owns your profile.
The right primary category, and secondary categories only where they're true.
Your address or service area, set the way Google's rules expect for your kind of business.
Regular hours, plus special hours for holidays.
Services or products, attributes, and links to your website and booking page.
A first set of real photos: outside, inside, your team, your work.
A tagged website link, so visits from your profile show up separately in your website analytics.
This is real work, and it's reasonable to pay for it once. It shouldn't be billed again every month.
Worth doing every month
Replying to reviews. Google lists responding to reviews among its own tips for improving local presence. A good service drafts replies in your voice, and you approve them.
Keeping details accurate. Checking that your hours, categories and contact details still say what you set them to, and fixing them quickly if they don't.
Fresh photos and updates that reflect what's actually happening in your business this month.
Reading the numbers. Searches, calls, direction requests and website clicks from the profile, and what changed since last month.
Connecting it to your website. The profile and the site should tell the same story, with the same name, address, phone number and services.
Ten minutes a week you can keep
Some of the most useful work is also the quickest, and it's often better done by you:
Reply to a new review the day it lands.
Add one good photo.
Update hours before a statutory holiday, remembering that observance varies by province.
Glance at the profile from a customer's point of view, on your phone.
If you'd like that routine written down, the 15-minute monthly SEO routine covers it.
What's padding
Ranking guarantees. Google says there's no way to pay for a better local ranking, so a guarantee is a promise nobody can keep.
Keywords added to your business name. Google's guidelines say including unnecessary information in your business name isn't permitted and could result in the suspension of your Business Profile (sourced from Google's guidelines). That isn't optimisation, it's a risk.
Posting every day for the sake of it. A useful update a month beats thirty forgettable ones.
Reviews you didn't earn. Anything involving reviews that didn't come from real customers is a risk to your profile, not a service.
A report with no actions in it. If the monthly report never leads to a change, you're paying for a PDF.
The agency as owner. They should be a manager on your profile. You stay the owner.
What a fair monthly service looks like
A fair service does the setup once, handles the monthly work above, tells you what changed and why, and leaves you in control of the account. In my own Foundations retainer, Google Business Profile setup, optimisation and ongoing management sit alongside an on-page SEO audit with a monthly health check and a monthly performance report, and you can see exactly what that tier includes.
Whoever you work with, ask them to list what they'll do in a typical month. If the list is mostly things you could do in ten minutes a week, you have your answer. So what's on yours?