Your Google Business Profile is the first thing most customers see, and most contractors set it up once in 2019 and never touched it again. Wrong category, four photos, a description that says “family owned and operated”, and reviews nobody replied to. Then they wonder why the competitor with the newer truck outranks them.
The profile is free, it takes about four hours to fix properly, and it is the biggest single factor in whether you show up in the map when someone nearby needs your service. This is the step-by-step. Do it in order.
If you want the bigger picture on how the profile fits with your website and reviews, read local SEO for trades companies first. This article is the profile itself.
Before you start: claim, verify, and clean house
Search your business name on Google Maps. You may find a profile you never created, an old one from a previous owner, or a duplicate with your old phone number. Claim what is yours and request removal of the rest through the “Suggest an edit” flow or the Business Profile support form.
Verification usually means a postcard, a video call, or a video recording of your truck, tools, and signage. The video route is common now for service area businesses. Have your truck lettering, license, and a business card ready before you start it.
One profile per business. If you have two trucks under one name, that is one profile. If you have two real locations with separate staff and separate phone numbers, that is two.
Categories and services
Step 1: Pick the primary category
The primary category tells Google what searches you belong in. Pick the one that matches your main money maker, and pick the most specific option available.
| If you mostly do | Use | Not |
|---|---|---|
| Dryer vent or duct work | Air duct cleaning service | Cleaning service |
| Pressure washing | Pressure washing service | Contractor |
| Gutters | Gutter cleaning service | Roofing contractor |
| HVAC | HVAC contractor | Contractor |
| Plumbing | Plumber | Plumbing supply store |
Step 2: Add secondary categories
Add up to nine more for the other services you actually sell and want calls for. Do not add categories for work you would rather not do. Each one you add slightly dilutes the primary, so keep it to three or four real ones.
Step 3: List every service
Under each category, Google offers preset services and lets you add custom ones. Add all of them. For each, write one or two plain sentences and a starting price if you have a simple one. “Dryer vent cleaning, from $149. Single family homes, all vent lengths, includes airflow test.” The price sets expectations and filters out the people who only want the cheapest.
Service areas, description, and contact info
Step 4: Set service areas
List the towns and zip codes you actually drive to, up to 20. Google recommends staying within about two hours of your base. Listing 40 towns does not get you ranked in 40 towns. It just makes the profile look thin. If you work from home, hide the address and only show service areas.
Step 5: Write the description
You have 750 characters. Use them to say what you do, where, for whom, and one reason to pick you. No keyword lists, no “we strive to”. A good template:
“[Company] cleans dryer vents and air ducts for homeowners and apartment communities in [City], [Town], and [Town]. Same-week scheduling, flat-rate pricing, and a written airflow report on every job. Licensed and insured, in business since [year]. Call or book online.”
Step 6: Lock down contact info
Phone, website, hours, and address must match your website and every other listing exactly. Set holiday hours ahead of time. If you answer the phone 24/7 for emergencies but the office closes at 5, set the hours to when the phone is answered. Google penalizes profiles that say “open” when nobody picks up.
Photos, products, and posts
Step 7: Upload real photos
Start with 15 to 20 and add two to four a week after that. Cover these:
- Logo and a cover photo of the truck or crew
- Before and after shots of actual jobs
- The crew working, with faces
- Equipment and the inside of the truck
- Any certifications or license on the wall
No stock photos. Google can detect them and customers can too. Name the files with the service and town before uploading. It probably does not help ranking much, but it costs nothing.
Step 8: Add products
The products section is meant for retail, but service companies can use it as a visual menu. Each product gets a photo, a name, a price or price range, and a description. “Whole-home dryer vent cleaning, $149 to $249” with a photo of a clean vent. It shows up on mobile as a scrolling row of cards, which is prime space.
Step 9: Post weekly
Posts show up on the profile for about a week. One a week is enough. Rotate between a recent job with a photo, a seasonal reminder (“gutters before the first freeze”), and an offer. Include the service and a town name in the text. Keep each post under 100 words with one photo.
Q and A, reviews, and responses
Step 10: Seed the Q and A
Anyone can ask a question on your profile, and anyone can answer it. If you do not fill this in, a random person will. Post the five questions you get on every call and answer them yourself:
- Do you charge a trip fee?
- Are you licensed and insured?
- How soon can you come out?
- Do you work with apartment complexes and HOAs?
- What forms of payment do you take?
Check it monthly. Answer anything new within a day.
Step 11: Respond to every review
Reply to every review, good and bad, within 24 hours. For good ones, thank them and mention the service and town in a natural way. “Thanks, Mike. Glad the gutter guards in Frisco are holding up through the storms.”
For bad ones, stay calm and brief. Acknowledge, state what you did or will do, and take it offline. “Sorry the tech was late on Tuesday. We called to reschedule and did not reach you. Please call the office and ask for Noah, and we will make it right.” Future customers read your response more closely than the complaint.
Never argue and never post a customer’s personal details. Never offer a discount for a changed review in writing.
Step 12: Build a review habit
The profile gives you a short review link. Put it in a text template and send it when the job closes. If you use Jobber, set the request to fire automatically. Ask every customer, not just the happy ones. A steady flow of new reviews matters more than the total.
Tracking calls from the profile
You cannot improve what you do not measure, and most owners have no idea how many calls the profile produces. Two options.
Option A: The built-in report. The profile’s performance section shows calls, direction requests, website clicks, and which search terms found you. It is free, it undercounts, and there are no recordings. Check it monthly at minimum.
Option B: A tracking number. Put a tracking number in the primary phone field and your real number in the additional phone field. Google still ties your real number to the business, so NAP consistency holds. Every call through the tracking number is logged with source, time, and a recording. Recordings are worth it on their own. Listening to ten calls a month will tell you more about your office staff than any report.
Whichever you pick, write the number down each month. Calls, direction requests, and website clicks. If those do not go up over 90 days of doing the steps above, something else is wrong, and it is usually the website. Read why your contractor website gets no calls for that side.
Mistakes that get profiles suspended
A suspension takes the profile off the map entirely, and appeals take one to three weeks with no guarantee. These are the causes we see most.
- Keywords in the business name. “Smith Plumbing” is fine. “Smith Plumbing Best Emergency Plumber Dallas” gets flagged, sometimes years later when a competitor reports it.
- A virtual office, PO box, or UPS store as the address. Google requires a real location with your staff in it. Service area businesses should hide the address instead.
- Showing a home address while claiming a storefront. If customers do not come to you, hide the address.
- Multiple profiles for one business. Old profiles from a name change, or a second one created to cover another town, will get both flagged.
- Mismatched info across the web. A different phone number on Yelp or an old address on Facebook lowers Google’s confidence and can trigger a review.
- Bulk edits. Changing the name, address, category, and phone all in one day looks like a hijack. Space major changes a few days apart.
- Review manipulation. Buying reviews, reviewing yourself from the office wifi, or using a gating tool that only sends happy customers. Google is better at catching this than it was.
- Sharing an address with another business. Two companies at one suite with different categories is a common flag.
If you do get suspended, do not create a new profile. Fix the violation, gather your license, utility bill, and photos of signage, and file the reinstatement form once. Repeated appeals slow it down.
Where Intrepid fits
We set up and clean up Google Business Profiles as part of every website we build for trades companies, including the call tracking and the review automation through Jobber. If you would rather hand it off than spend the four hours, see /websites or book a call and we will audit the profile with you on the first call.