Google Business Profile for contractors

For a contractor, the Google Business Profile is often the first thing a new customer sees: the listing in the map results, with your reviews, photos and a button to call. It’s free, and it’s worth an afternoon to set up properly.

1. Set it up as a service-area business

If you go to your customers, rather than them coming to you, set the profile up as a service-area business. You still verify an address with Google, but you hide it from the public listing and show the towns you cover instead. This matters if you work from home: Google’s guidelines don’t allow a home address to be shown when customers don’t visit it.

Add the towns or regions you actually serve. Keep the list to the area you’d really drive to; a huge area doesn’t help you rank in it.

2. Use your real business name

Use the name on your truck, your invoices and your sign, exactly. Adding keywords or towns to the name (“Smith Landscaping Best Interlock St. Catharines”) is against Google’s guidelines and can get a profile suspended.

3. Pick the right primary category

The primary category is the single most important choice on the profile. Pick the one that matches the work you most want, like “Landscaper”, “Snow removal service” or “Painter”. Then add secondary categories for other work you do. Look at the profiles that show up first for your main search and see which categories they use.

4. List every service

Add each service you offer, with a short plain description. “Interlock patios”, “Spring clean-up”, “Seasonal snow contracts”. Use the words a customer would type, not trade jargon.

5. Add real photos, and keep adding them

Photos of your own jobs, your crew and your trucks, with no stock images. Add a few after every good job. A profile that’s kept up to date looks like a business that’s busy.

6. Ask every happy customer for a review

• Ask once the job is done and the customer is pleased, by text or email, with the direct link to your review form. In your profile, select “Read reviews”, then “Get more reviews”, and copy the link.
• Ask everyone, not just the customers you expect to be happy. Picking and choosing who you ask (“review gating”) is against Google’s guidelines.
• Never pay for reviews or offer a discount in exchange for one.
• Reply to every review, good or bad, briefly and politely. Future customers read the replies.

7. Keep your details the same everywhere

Your name, phone number and website should match exactly on your profile, your website, your truck, and directories like Yelp, Bing Places and Apple Maps. Search engines use that match as a sign you’re a real, established business.

8. Set your hours, and keep them right

Set the hours you answer the phone. Update them for holidays and for the season if they change. A customer who calls during your listed hours and gets no answer may not call twice.

9. Post now and then

Google Business Profile posts are short updates with a photo: a finished job, a seasonal reminder (“Booking spring clean-ups now”), an offer. They don’t need to be clever. They show the profile is alive.

Quick checklist

• Service-area business, address hidden if customers don’t visit
• Real business name, no keywords added
• The right primary category, plus secondary ones
• Every service listed
• Towns you actually serve
• Photos of real jobs, added regularly
• A review ask after every job, to every customer
• Replies to every review
• Name, phone and hours the same everywhere

Want it done for you? Setting up and looking after the Google profile is part of our local SEO for contractors. Or start with the free diagnostic, and we’ll tell you plainly what we’d fix first.