Your Google Business Profile, field by field
It is free, it takes an evening, and most contractors fill it in once and never touch it again. Here is what each field actually does.
The map pack, the three businesses Google shows above the regular results, is where emergency jobs are decided. Your Business Profile is the only way into it, it costs nothing, and it is the single most under-maintained asset in this trade. What follows is every field that matters and what it actually changes.
Name: the field that gets listings suspended
Your profile name must be your real-world business name. What is on the van, the license and the invoice. Not "Reyes Plumbing | Emergency Plumber Phoenix 24/7". Keyword-stuffed names do correlate with map rankings, which is exactly why Google's guidelines forbid them and why listings get suspended for it. A suspension is not a slap on the wrist: you lose the reviews and the ranking while you appeal.
If your legal name genuinely contains the trade word. "Reyes Plumbing" rather than "Reyes Services". You get that benefit honestly and permanently. That is one of the better arguments for naming the company after the trade in the first place.
Categories: the field that decides what you can rank for
Primary category. This one carries more weight than the other nine combined. "Plumber" is the obvious choice for a plumbing company; the interesting decision is when your money is in one service. If most of your revenue is water heaters, "Water heater installation" as primary is worth testing against "Plumber".
Secondary categories. Add only what you actually do and want more of. Every category you add is a set of searches you become eligible for, and a set of enquiries you will have to turn down if you added it aspirationally.
Address and service area: hide one, define the other
Most contractors are service-area businesses: you go to the customer, they do not come to you. If that is you, hide the address. A visible home address does not help you rank and does put your house on a map. What replaces it is the service area, and here the instinct to claim the whole metro is the wrong one.
List the towns you genuinely roll trucks to. Google cross-checks a service area against other signals about where you operate, and a wildly inflated one is a trust problem rather than a reach advantage. It also generates enquiries you have to decline, which costs you a review you would otherwise have earned.
Services and the description
The services list is a set of named items with short descriptions. Fill in every service you actually offer, in the words customers use, "drain cleaning", not "hydro-jetting solutions". These give Google a vocabulary for your business beyond the category, and they show up in the profile itself where a customer is deciding whether to tap.
The business description is 750 characters and is mostly read by humans, not the ranking system. Use it for the things a skeptical homeowner checks: how long you have been trading, licensed and insured, which towns, and what you do not do. Naming what you do not do is unusual and reads as honest.
Photos: the field that is actually a habit
A logo is not a photo. What earns a tap is a picture of your truck outside a real house, your crew, and a finished job. Ten of those beat a stock image every time, because the homeowner is deciding whether to let a stranger into their home and is looking for evidence that you are real.
The part that matters more than the pictures is the frequency. A profile that gained five photos this month reads as an active business to both a customer and to Google; one whose last photo is from three years ago reads as closed.
The ten minutes a month that keep it working
- Add three to five real job photos. Before and after, the truck on site, the panel you tidied up.
- Reply to every new review. Name the job in the reply. It takes a sentence.
- Answer the Q&A box. Customers ask questions there; anyone can answer, so answer as the owner before someone else guesses.
- Post one update. A seasonal reminder or a finished job. Low effort, and it is a freshness signal.
- Check your hours. Especially around holidays. Wrong hours on an emergency search are missed jobs that you never hear about.
An unclaimed profile with the wrong hours costs more jobs than a bad review does.
What to do when something goes wrong
Two problems are common enough to name. A duplicate listing, usually created years ago by a data aggregator, splits your reviews and your ranking; report it as a duplicate rather than deleting it, so the reviews merge. And a suspension is appealed, not rebuilt: create a second profile and you have made the problem permanent instead of temporary.