GBP services and products: listing your tours for local search visibility
A potential customer types “guided rafting trips near me” into their phone from a hotel parking lot. Google shows three businesses on the map. Each one has photos, pricing, and a booking link right in the listing. Yours shows a phone number and an address.
Most outdoor recreation businesses claim their GBP and stop there. They pick a category, add hours, maybe upload a logo. The products and services sections sit empty. Those are the sections Google pulls from when deciding what to show in local results, and they are what convince someone to click through to your booking page instead of scrolling past.
What the products and services sections actually do
GBP has two separate places to list what you offer. They work differently, and most outfitters ignore both.
The services section is text-only. You type in a service name and a short description. No photos, no pricing, no links. Google reads it to understand what your business does, and sometimes displays pieces of it in your listing. Customers rarely interact with it directly.
The products section is more useful. Each product gets a photo, a description, a price, and a link to a specific page on your website. On mobile, these show up as a swipeable carousel right inside your listing. For a tour or activity business, this is where individual trips, rental packages, and guided experiences belong.
Google also rolled out a feature called “Things to do” specifically for tour and activity operators. If you add your own ticketed experiences through this module, your listing shows up above third-party aggregators like Viator and GetYourGuide in the booking panel. That alone is worth the setup time.
Choose the right categories first
Before you touch products or services, check your categories. Your primary category is the strongest ranking signal you control in GBP. Get it wrong and nothing else in the listing will compensate.
Google has over 4,000 business categories as of early 2026. The ones that matter for outdoor recreation: “Raft trip outfitter,” “Canoe and Kayak Tour Agency,” “Fishing charter,” “Tour operator,” “Adventure sports center,” and “Outdoor activity organiser.” You can add up to nine secondary categories. Use them. A whitewater rafting company that also rents kayaks and runs guided fishing trips should have categories reflecting all three activities.
Pick the most specific option available. “Raft trip outfitter” beats “Tour operator” if rafting is your main thing. Not sure which categories your competitors picked? Search their business names on Google Maps and look at what shows up under their listing. The local keyword playbook can also help you match your activities to the terms people actually type in.
Add your tours as products
Open your GBP dashboard and go to the Products section. If you do not see it, your primary category may not support products, and you will need to switch to one that does.
For each tour or activity, you need five things.
A clear, specific name. “Half-Day Arkansas River Rafting Trip” tells Google and customers more than “Rafting Experience.” Use the language your customers actually use. If people in your area search for “guided fly fishing trip” rather than “angling excursion,” go with the first one.
A photo of that specific trip. Not your logo. Not a stock photo of a generic river. A real photo from a real day on the water. Listings with quality photos receive 42 percent more requests for directions according to Google’s own data, and the recommended image size is 2048 by 1366 pixels.
A description written in plain language. Location, duration, what is included, who it is for. Something like: “A 4-hour guided rafting trip through Brown’s Canyon on the Arkansas River. Class III-IV rapids. All equipment provided. Ages 12 and up.” That does more work than a paragraph of marketing copy. It also puts the geographic and activity keywords right where Google can use them to match your listing to a search.
A price. Even a starting-at price is better than leaving it blank.
A link to the booking or landing page for that trip, not your homepage. If someone clicks on your half-day rafting product, they should land on the page where they can book that trip. The guide on landing pages that book trips covers how to build those pages well.
List services for everything else
The services section is less visible, but it still matters for search relevance. Use it for the things that do not fit as individual products: shuttle services, group discounts, private trip options, gear rental add-ons, photography packages.
Go to the Services tab in your GBP dashboard. You can organize services into categories, which helps if you offer a range of activities. Nantahala Outdoor Center in North Carolina, for instance, might organize into “Whitewater Rafting,” “Kayak Instruction,” and “Zip Line Tours.” Glacier Raft Company in Montana might separate “Scenic Floats” from “Whitewater Trips” and “Fishing Trips.”
Keep each service description to one or two sentences. Include the location and activity type. Use the terms your customers search for, but do not stuff them in artificially.
Keep your listings current
A product listing from last season with outdated pricing and a dead booking link is worse than having nothing there. Update your GBP products and services at least four times a year.
Late winter: add spring and early summer trips. April: swap in peak summer offerings. Late summer: update with fall trips. After your season ends, mark seasonal products accordingly so nobody tries to book something you are not running.
Buffalo Outdoor Center in Ponca, Arkansas, for example, swaps out their product listings with the seasons. In spring, they feature float trips on the Buffalo National River. By summer, they have added guided kayak tours and cabin-and-canoe packages. When October hits, the listings shift to fall foliage paddle trips on the upper Buffalo. Each update includes current photos, current pricing, and working booking links.
Regular updates also signal to Google that your listing is alive. Google favors active listings in local rankings, so seasonal refreshes do two jobs at once.
Connect products to your broader local seo
Your GBP products and services are one piece of how Google decides whether to show your business when someone searches for an activity in your area. The product name, the description, and the page you link to all send signals about what you do and where you do it. When those line up with a search query, you are more likely to land in the map pack.
If you run rafting trips on the Deschutes River, your product listing should say “Deschutes River.” The linked landing page should say “Deschutes River.” Your services section should mention the Deschutes too. That consistency between your GBP and your website is what helps you rank in map results for “rafting near me” searches.
The products section also gives you an edge over third-party booking platforms. When your own ticketed experiences show up in the “Things to do” panel, customers book through your site instead of through an aggregator taking a cut. For a small outfitter going up against platforms with massive ad budgets, that direct booking path matters. There is a whole strategy around competing with Viator and GetYourGuide as a smaller operator, and your GBP products are one part of it.
The setup checklist
Here is what to do this week.
- Verify your primary and secondary GBP categories are correct and specific.
- Add every tour, trip, rental, and guided experience as a product with a photo, description, price, and booking link.
- Add supporting services (shuttles, group rates, gear rentals, private trips) in the services section.
- Check that every product links to the correct landing page, not your homepage.
- Set a calendar reminder to update your products at the start of each season.
- UTM tag your product booking links so you can track which GBP products drive actual bookings in Google Analytics.
The whole process takes an hour or two for most businesses. Ongoing maintenance is maybe fifteen minutes every few months. For the local search visibility it gets you, there is not a better use of a slow Tuesday afternoon.
