Google Business Profile for Tradespeople: The Setup That Brings Local Work

Search for almost any trade plus a town and the top of the page is not a list of websites. It is a map with three businesses on it. Those three slots are chosen by a free product most tradespeople have either never claimed or last touched years ago: Google Business Profile.

Claim it properly first

Search your business name on Google. If a listing appears with an "Own this business?" prompt, nobody has claimed it and you should do that immediately, before a competitor or a spam listing does. Verification is usually by video or postcard, and it can take a few days, so start early.

If you work from home without a premises customers visit, hide your address and set a service area instead. Showing a home address that customers then turn up at is one of the most common and most regretted mistakes on the platform.

The settings that actually move rankings

Primary category. This matters more than anything else on the profile. A plumber categorised as a "handyman" will lose to a plumber categorised as a plumber. Add two or three secondary categories only where you genuinely do that work.

Service areas. List the towns and villages you will really travel to. Do not list a fifty-mile radius covering half a county; relevance beats reach, and customers distrust a business that claims to serve everywhere.

Services with descriptions. Each service you add can surface for a different search. "Emergency boiler repair" and "Bathroom installation" are different doors into the same business.

Hours, including holiday hours. Inconsistent hours are a ranking dampener and a trust killer when a customer arrives to find you closed.

Photos. Add real photos of finished work, your van and your team, and replace them monthly. Profiles with regular photo activity get more calls, and it takes a minute on site.

Reviews are the real lever

The businesses in the top three slots almost always have more reviews, more recent reviews and better ratings. There is no shortcut to this, but the process is simple:

• Ask every satisfied customer at the end of the job, in person, while they are pleased.
• Send the direct review link by text so it takes two taps.
• Reply to every review, good or bad, within a day.
• Never buy reviews. Filtering catches them, and a suspended profile is far worse than a thin one.

Aim for a steady trickle rather than a burst. Five reviews a month for a year beats forty in one week and silence afterwards.

Use posts and questions

Google Business Profile posts behave like small updates and are indexed. Post a finished job with two photos and a sentence about the location once a week. Likewise, seed your own questions and answers section with the things customers always ring up to ask: do you charge a callout fee, do you supply materials, what areas do you cover.

Link the profile to your listings everywhere

Your Google profile is one door. A directory profile on a marketplace such as Amber Advertising is another, and they support each other: consistent name, address and phone details across both, plus links between them, tell search engines you are the same real business.

The practical setup is this: claim the profile, choose one accurate primary category, list your real service areas, add services with plain descriptions, put up ten genuine photos, and ask for a review after every job. That is an afternoon of work and then twenty minutes a month, and for most local trades it outperforms anything paid.