How to set up a Google Business Profile properly.

Your primary category does more for local search than any other field on the listing, and most businesses get it wrong on that one dropdown before they get anything else wrong. Pick the wrong one and no amount of photos, posts or review requests will put you in the map pack for the searches that matter.

That is the headline. The rest of this is the order to do everything in, with the detail that trips people up at each step. It is written for a trade or a local business with one location, and most of it takes an afternoon.

Claiming and verifying

Search your own business name on Google. One of three things is true.

Nothing exists. You create the profile from scratch at the Google Business Profile site. Straightforward.

A listing exists and nobody has claimed it. Google generates these from other data. Claim it rather than creating a second one, because a duplicate will fight your real listing for the rest of its life.

A listing exists and somebody else manages it. Usually a past marketing supplier, sometimes a franchise head office, occasionally a former partner. Request access through the profile. The current manager gets a few days to respond, and if they ignore it, access generally transfers to you. Before you start, read who actually owns your website, because a profile held by somebody else is rarely the only thing held by somebody else.

Verification is where people stall. Google decides the method and you do not get to pick it. It may be a postcard to the address, a phone call, an email, or a video walkthrough where you film your signage, your tools or your van, your workspace and then yourself logged into the account.

Two things make video verification go smoothly. Film it in one continuous take without stopping, and show something that ties the address to the business before you show anything else. A failed attempt is not fatal, but it sends you to the back of a queue, so it is worth five minutes of preparation.

Getting the primary category right

One field. One value. It does more to decide which searches you appear in than everything else on the listing combined.

Google maintains a fixed list and you can only choose from it. The trap is that several entries sound almost identical and behave very differently. An electrician who picks a supply or retail category disappears from service searches. A general contractor category and a specific trade category produce different results for the same query in the same town.

Here is the method that works better than guessing.

1. Search the exact phrase your best customer would type, on a phone, with location set to the town you want to appear in.
2. Open each of the top three map results.
3. Look at the category printed under each business name. That is their primary.
4. If all three share a category and you are eligible for it, that is your answer.

Appearing is not the same as deserving, so apply judgement. If the top three are all large firms doing something adjacent to your work, go one step more specific rather than copying them.

Change your primary category at most once, then leave it alone for a month and watch what happens to calls. Changing several things in the same week means you learn nothing from any of them.

Secondary categories, and when to stop

Secondary categories widen the set of searches you can appear in. They also dilute, and they carry much less weight than the primary.

Add only what you genuinely do and would happily be called about tomorrow. Three to five is a sensible total for most trades. A painter who adds drywall, pressure washing and deck staining because the work is real is doing it right. A painter who adds flooring, roofing and landscaping on the theory that more is better has told Google it is unclear what the business is, and unclear businesses rank for less.

Delete anything you added years ago and no longer offer. Stale categories generate the worst kind of enquiry: the one you have to turn down.

Service area or street address

Pick one. The right answer follows a single question: do customers come to you?

They come to you. A shop, a studio, a clinic. Show the street address, make sure the map pin sits on the door rather than in the middle of the block, and set accurate hours.

You go to them. Almost every trade. Hide the address and set a service area instead. If you run the business from home, hiding the address is not optional, and leaving it visible publishes your home on the internet with a map pin on it.

Both, genuinely. A shop with a counter plus a mobile crew. Show the address and add the service area. This is the only case where both is correct, and it is rarer than people claim.

You can only list a limited number of areas, so spend them on the towns where the work actually is rather than on everything within an hour's drive. Listing areas you do not serve does not help you rank in them and does generate calls you have to refuse.

A service area is not a ranking lever. Proximity to the searcher still matters enormously, which is why a page on your own site for each town is the thing that moves the needle. That part is covered in the local SEO checklist for trades.

Photos that actually matter

Ten photos of your own work beats a hundred of anything else. Take them on your phone, in daylight, and do not put stock imagery anywhere near the listing.

What is worth photographing, roughly in order:

• Finished work, close enough to see the quality. The single most persuasive asset you have.
• Before and after pairs, uploaded as two images rather than one collage.
• Your van or your signage, which also helps verification and tells people what to look for in the driveway.
• The crew, faces visible. People hire people.
• The premises, if customers visit.

Add a handful every month rather than forty in one sitting. A listing that gains photos looks like a business that is still operating, and that is a signal worth more than any one image.

Skip the logo as a cover photo, skip anything with text burned into it, and skip pictures of a laptop on a desk.

Posts, and what they are actually worth

Posts appear on your listing and expire. They are worth doing and they are not worth agonizing over.

Useful posts: a job you just finished with a photo, a seasonal reminder your customers genuinely need, an offer with a real end date, a change to your hours.

One a month is plenty for a trade. The honest value is not ranking, it is that somebody comparing three listings sees recent activity on yours and silence on the others.

What posts cannot do is replace pages on your own site. A post expires and takes its content with it. A page compounds.

The questions section nobody uses

Scroll down any profile and you will find a questions area. On most local listings it is empty, or it contains one unanswered question from eight months ago, which reads exactly as badly as you imagine.

You are allowed to post questions yourself and answer them. This is not a loophole, it is a documented feature, and it is one of the few places where a few minutes of work produces something nobody else in your market has done.

Post the five questions you are actually asked on the phone. Do you charge for quotes. How far do you travel. Are you insured. What is the typical wait for a booking. Do you do emergency call-outs. Answer each one plainly, in a sentence or two, from the business account.

Then set an alert so you see new questions from real customers. An unanswered question sitting in public is worse than no questions at all.

Asking for reviews without tripping the filter

Reviews disappear for predictable reasons, and all of them are avoidable.

Ask in person, at the end of the job. Then follow up once with a text containing the direct review link. Once. A second nudge is fine a week later. A third is harassment.

Spread them out. A business with four reviews in two years that suddenly collects twenty in nine days looks exactly like a business that bought twenty reviews. Two or three a month, steadily, builds faster than any burst because they all survive.

Never incentivize. Discounts, draws, free upgrades in exchange for a review all breach the rules, and a reviewer mentioning the discount in their text documents the breach permanently.

Never filter. Asking happy customers privately and routing unhappy ones to a complaints form is called gating, it is against the rules, and the software that offers it will not be the party that suffers.

Do not collect them on your own device or wifi. A cluster of reviews from one network is the simplest pattern in the world to detect.

Reply to every one. Thank the good ones in a line. For a bad one, answer once, factually, without arguing, and offer to take it off the platform. Everything you write is addressed to the next person reading, not to the reviewer.

A fifteen minute monthly routine

Once the setup is done, this is the whole ongoing job.

1. Add two or three photos of recent work.
2. Post once.
3. Answer any new questions and every new review.
4. Check your hours against the month ahead, including holidays.
5. Confirm nothing has changed on the listing that you did not change yourself.

That last one matters. Anyone can suggest an edit to your profile, and suggestions sometimes go live. Checking monthly is how you catch a wrong phone number before it costs you a fortnight of calls.

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If the profile is in order and the enquiries still are not arriving, the bottleneck is usually the site people land on afterwards. Tell us the business and we will look at both and say which one is actually costing you work.