For a business customers choose by where it is, this is the single most-quoted source about you. When somebody asks an AI who to hire nearby, your Google listing is very often what it reads before it reads your website. It is free and it takes about ten minutes.
Creating it
Search for your business first. Go to google.com/business and look for your name and town. A listing often already exists because somebody added it, and claiming one is faster than starting again.
Verify it. Google will offer post, phone or video. The postcard is the slowest of the three, so take another if you are given the choice.
Fill in the name, category, phone number and website exactly as they appear on your own site. Matching details across sources are how anything reading about you confirms the listing and the website are the same business.
Nothing else in the Local presence score can be measured until the listing exists, so this is the one to do first.
If it says temporarily closed
A profile marked temporarily closed reads as unavailable to customers and to anything summarising you, and an engine choosing who to recommend has an easy reason to pick somebody else. Whatever the original reason, mark yourself open again as soon as you are trading. It is a two-minute job.
If location is not how customers choose you
Then none of this applies and you are not marked down for it. Tell us on your business profile that location is not part of how customers pick you, and the whole Local presence score shows as not applicable rather than as a zero. A missing score and a zero mean very different things here.