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Google charges ₹0 to create or claim a Google Business Profile anywhere in India. Agencies and freelancers charge for setting it up, helping with verification, optimizing it and managing it over time. Here is what that work covers and what to check before you pay.
Google charges ₹0 to create or claim a Google Business Profile anywhere in India. Many business owners still call this listing Google My Business or GMB. Agencies and freelancers do charge for the work around it: setting it up, helping with verification, optimizing it and managing it over time.
This article covers what that work involves, what business owners in Indore told our team after paying for it, and what to check before you pay anyone, wherever your business is.
A disclosure before we start: MARQOD is an agency based in Indore that sells Google Business Profile services. Our own prices are listed near the end so you can compare them against everything else in this article.
Google's help page on working with third parties states that Business Profile can be used at no charge, which means you pay Google ₹0. The same page says third parties often charge a fee to manage a profile.
Google also warns owners about calls, emails and messages from people offering help with a profile in exchange for money, including people claiming to be from Google. Its profile security page says Google doesn't charge for the service and will never ask for your OTP or PIN.
So if anyone describes part of their fee as "Google's charge" for the listing, that is false. Whatever you pay goes to the agency for its work.
An agency charges for time and skill. Setting up a profile properly takes real work, and paying someone to do it is a reasonable choice for a busy shop owner.
A basic setup usually covers:
Optimization goes further. It can include:
Beyond the profile, local SEO covers work such as citations on other directories, a location page on your website, LocalBusiness schema and ranking reports.
These three levels of work cost different amounts, and an agency's quote should say which one you're buying.
In conversations with business owners in Indore, our sales team heard from 7 businesses that had paid an agency or freelancer for Google Business Profile work and weren't happy with the result. We aren't naming them because we didn't ask for permission to publish their identities.
Seven businesses is a small group, so their experience tells you what went wrong for them and nothing about agencies as a whole.
Some of these businesses had paid around ₹9,000. The problems they described fell into a few groups:
When a customer taps "Directions" on your profile, Google Maps sends them to the pin. If the pin is wrong, they reach the wrong street or lane and either call you for directions or give up.
Some customers may assume you've moved or shut down. For a shop that depends on walk-in customers, that means lost sales every day the pin stays wrong.
Google's guidelines for representing your business require that profile information match the real business. Checking the pin is the first thing to do once anyone finishes setting up your profile.
We saw this with one of our clients, Arika Spa and Wellness. Their location on Google was wrong. We corrected it, and we continue to work with them on their profile.
Under Google's third-party policies, agencies have to tell businesses about their ownership and management options. The business decides whether an agency gets Co-Owner access, Manager access or no access at all. The policy also says the business must keep ownership of its own profile.
To check who has access, search for your business on Google while signed in to the account you think owns the profile. Open the profile menu, then Business Profile settings, then People and access. If your own account doesn't appear there as an owner, ask whoever set up the profile to add you before you pay them anything more.
If an agency refuses to hand over access, you can report it through Google's third-party policy complaint form, which is linked from the third-party help page.
Get the answers in writing, even if that's just a WhatsApp message:
A price on its own tells you very little. A ₹2,000 quote for a correct basic setup can be better value than a ₹9,000 quote that only enters your name, address and phone number. A ₹9,000 package can be good value if it covers a full audit, citations, a review system and monthly reports.
Put the quotes side by side and compare what each agency will deliver, item by item. We publish our own plans and prices for the same reason: so you can compare them item by item.
If someone has already set up your profile, go through this list yourself:
| Item | What to check |
|---|---|
| Business name | Matches the board outside your shop, with no extra keywords |
| Primary category | Describes what you mainly sell or do |
| Address | Correct and complete |
| Maps pin | Sits on your actual building |
| Phone | Rings at your shop |
| Website | Opens the right site |
| Hours | Match your real opening times, including Sunday |
| Services and products | Your main ones are listed |
| Photos | Show your real shop and products |
| Reviews | You can read and reply to them |
| Ownership | Your own Google account is listed as an owner |
If the pin, phone number and ownership are all correct, your profile is already in usable shape. You may not need to pay anyone for a basic setup, only for optimization work if you want it.
Our ₹2,000 plan covers:
For businesses that want more, we offer full GMB optimization and ongoing work to maintain your ranking. Details are on our GMB optimization page, and all our prices are on the pricing page. If you also want your website to rank, our website SEO service covers it.
The information about Indore businesses comes from conversations our sales team had with business owners. We gave those notes to an AI tool to produce a first draft, and the article is published under Anmol Jat's name.
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