Nearly every trade has a Google listing. Someone set it up years ago, or Google generated it from an old directory entry and you claimed it one wet afternoon. Then it sat there.
That listing is what a customer sees when they search for a window cleaner, a plumber or a valeter near them. It is what shows in the map results, and what fills the side of the page when somebody types your business name in. It costs nothing to run, and it is almost always the part of a trade's online presence with the most obvious problems still sat in it.
Here is what goes wrong most often, and what to do about it.
The primary category is the wrong one
Google lets you set one primary category and a handful of extras. The primary one carries the most weight in deciding which searches your listing can turn up for, so it wants to match the work you actually want more of, not the broadest thing you are capable of.
A roof cleaner listed as "Roofing contractor" is sat in among firms fitting new roofs. A gutter and fascia man listed as "Cleaning service" is next to domestic cleaners doing kitchens. If the van earns its money on exterior cleaning, pick the category that says exterior cleaning, and put everything else in as secondary categories.
Worth a look once a year, too. Google adds and renames categories, so a better fit than the one you picked in 2019 may exist now.
The service area covers half of England
It is tempting to tick every town within an hour's drive on the theory that more area means more enquiries. It does not work like that, and it has a real cost: you spend your evenings on calls for jobs that are not worth the diesel, and you read as a national operation rather than the local firm you are.
Set the area to where you would genuinely turn out tomorrow morning. And if you have no shop or yard that customers visit, you can hide the street address and show a service area instead, which is worth knowing if you work from home and would rather not have the address on the internet.
The business name has keywords jammed into it
"Dave's Window Cleaning – Gutter Cleaning Stoke, Cheap Conservatory Roofs" is not a business name. Google's guidelines are clear that the name field should hold the name you actually trade under, the one on the van and the invoice.
Listings that stuff it can be quietly edited back by Google, reported by a competitor, or in the worst case suspended. Getting a suspension lifted is a tedious few weeks, and you lose the listing while you wait. The services you offer belong in the categories and the services list instead. Those fields were built for it.
The opening hours are fiction
This comes in two versions. The first is hours nobody has touched since the day the listing was set up, so it says nine to five while you are answering the phone from seven. The second, and more common, is hours that say you are open at times you are up a ladder and cannot pick up.
Set the hours to when you can realistically answer, and add bank holidays and the Christmas shutdown as special hours when they come round. Someone who rings a listing that says "open" and gets voicemail normally just rings the next one down the list. That is the cheapest job you will lose all week.
There are no photos, or only the logo
Photos are the one part of a listing a customer genuinely studies. A listing with your logo and nothing else tells them nothing. A listing with a dozen honest photos of finished work does most of your selling before the phone rings.
Use your own, not stock. Before and after pairs of jobs you are proud of, the van, a shot of you on site. Add a few every month rather than uploading forty once and never going back. If keeping that up is the bit that never happens, it is exactly the sort of job worth handing over — it is what our Google Business Profile posting service exists to keep ticking over.
Reviews: asked for badly, and never replied to
Most trades know reviews matter and still leave them to chance, which means they arrive from the customers keen enough to go looking for the listing, and from the occasional unhappy one.
Ask at the moment the customer is happiest, which is usually while they are stood on the drive looking at the clean roof, not three weeks later by text when they have forgotten your name. Make it one tap — the short review link from your profile, saved in your phone.
Two things to avoid. Do not offer money, a discount or anything else in exchange for a review; Google's review policies prohibit it outright. And do not only ask the customers you are confident will be kind — Google takes a dim view of it, and a run of flawless reviews with nothing in between reads as managed rather than real.
Then reply to all of them, the bad one included. Future customers read your reply far more carefully than they read the complaint. A calm, specific answer does you more good than the review did you harm.
The services, description and website link nobody has touched
Three fields that take twenty minutes between them and are usually blank.
The services list should name the jobs you actually do, in the words a customer would use. The description is for a person reading it, not a keyword list, so write it the way you would explain the business to a neighbour. And the website link does not have to point at your home page — if you have a page about gutter cleaning, point it there.
It gets set up once and never looked at
A listing is not a form you fill in. Posts expire after a week or so. Photos go stale. Hours change. Questions get asked on the listing and sit there unanswered, sometimes answered wrongly by a member of the public.
Ten minutes a fortnight covers it: a post, two photos, a glance at the questions and any new reviews. Put it in the diary on the same day you do your invoices and it actually happens.
When this will not move the needle for you
An honest note, because a Google listing is not the answer to everything.
- If most of your work comes as a subcontractor for other trades, a listing does very little. Your time is better spent on those relationships.
- If you cannot answer the phone during the day and have nobody who can, fix that first. Every bit of advertising you do, free or paid, leaks out of that hole.
- If you are new in an area, you are listed alongside firms with years of reviews behind them. A tidy listing helps, but it will not jump that queue on its own, and paid search is usually the faster route in while the listing builds up.
- If you are genuinely booked out for months, leave it. Come back when the diary thins.
Where to start this week
If you only do four things, do these:
- Check your primary category is the work you want more of.
- Tighten the service area to where you would really travel.
- Fix the opening hours so they match when you answer.
- Add six photos of real jobs, and reply to every review you have.
None of it is complicated. It is just the kind of thing that never reaches the top of the list when you have been out on jobs since seven.
We work with one business per trade per area, so we either have room for you or we will say so. Book a free call and we will tell you honestly whether it is worth it.
