The listing that shows up before your website does.
For most trades, the Google Business Profile is the first thing a searcher sees, ahead of the site, ahead of a review, ahead of anything else. Getting it right is unglamorous, ongoing work: the correct category, real photos, hours that are actually current, and reviews handled properly rather than left to sit.
Get a free quoteWhat's actually managed
A profile that's been claimed and then left alone works against you almost as much as one that's never been claimed. This is the part that keeps running after the setup.
The primary category is the single biggest lever on the whole profile. It decides which searches you're even eligible to show up for. Services and the service area are set to match what you actually do and where you actually travel to, not left on whatever Google filled in by default.
For a trade people hire on the strength of what they can see, the photos on the profile are the shortlist. A folder of finished jobs, loaded regularly rather than uploaded once and forgotten, tells a searcher more in five seconds than a paragraph of copy.
Customers are asked at the point they're happiest (job finished, invoice paid) with a direct link, not a vague request weeks later when the job's gone cold. Every review that comes in gets a reply, good or difficult.
It's registered in your name, not ours
The profile is claimed and verified under your business, not an agency login you'd have to chase to get back. If you ever stop working with us, the profile (and everything built into it) stays yours. That's a standing rule, not a case-by-case favour.
Posts, hours and the small stuff that drifts
A profile drifts out of date in small ways a customer notices before Google does: hours that don't account for a public holiday, a phone number that changed two office moves ago, a "posts" tab that's been empty since it was set up. None of it is dramatic on its own. Together it's enough to make someone ring the next name on the list instead.
Hours get corrected around holidays and closures as they come up, and a short post goes up when there's something worth saying, a job just finished, a service added, a change to how you can be reached. It's upkeep, done on a schedule, rather than a one-off setup that's never touched again.
What we need from you, and what nobody controls
A short list, and one item on it causes most of the delays. Whether you work from a premises a customer can walk into or only travel to them, because Google treats those as two different kinds of listing and the wrong one is awkward to undo. Your real hours. Photos of your own work rather than stock. And whether a profile already exists for the business, which it often does, sometimes created by Google itself and sometimes claimed years ago by a marketing company nobody at the business can now name. Getting that one back takes a verification process on Google's timetable, not ours, and it is worth starting early.
Being upfront about the limit: how close your address is to whoever is searching affects what they see, and nobody can change that. A well-kept profile competes properly for the searches near you and does not turn a suburb you have no presence in into a strong one. Reviews sit in the same category. We make asking for them part of how a finished job ends, and after that it is your customers writing them, which is the only way it works and the only way it is allowed to.
A different surface to organic search
The profile is what feeds the map pack, the three local results shown with a map alongside a normal search. That's a separate surface from the organic list underneath it, which is built by the website's own content and structure rather than the profile itself. A business can be strong on one and weak on the other, which is why the two are treated as related but distinct work.
Tell us the trade, we'll tell you what's missing from the profile
We'll look at what's currently showing up for your business in Google and tell you straight what we'd fix first. No charge.