The profile fields contractors leave blank

Your Google Business Profile is free, it takes a couple of hours to fill in properly, and for most contractors it out-produces the website as the thing that actually generates calls. It is also the piece of marketing most likely to have been set up once, by whoever built the site, and never opened again.

This is a field-by-field pass. Open your profile in another tab and work down it.

Categories

One primary, up to nine additional. The primary carries most of the weight in whether you show up for a given search, and specific beats broad: Air Conditioning Repair Service tells Google more than Contractor does.

Pick the primary that matches the work you most want more of, then look at the businesses currently ranking above you and see what they used. Additional categories should be services you genuinely offer. Adding ones you do not serve dilutes relevance rather than widening it.

Services

Almost always blank. This is the biggest missed field on the profile.

You can list every service you sell as its own entry, each with its own description. That is a substantial amount of specific text about exactly what you do, written by you, and the overwhelming majority of contractor profiles leave it empty.

Write them like a human. “Same-day AC repair on residential systems: diagnostics, capacitors, coils, refrigerant, blower motors. Most repairs finished on the first visit.” Not a keyword list.

Service areas

You get up to twenty. Use towns and neighbourhoods you would genuinely drive to tomorrow. Working out of Wilmington that usually means somewhere between eight and fifteen entries, not twenty scraped off a county map.

Listing a huge area does not make you rank across it. Distance is calculated from the searcher, and an inflated service area just makes your profile less specific about where you belong.

One rule that matters more than people realise: if you do not have a storefront or office customers can visit, you should be set up as a service-area business with the address hidden. Listing a home address you do not actually receive customers at is a guideline violation, and it is the most common reason a contractor profile gets suspended.

Hours, and special hours

Set your real hours. Then set special hours for holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas, the Fourth. Google flags profiles with unconfirmed holiday hours in the listing itself, which looks careless to anyone reading it.

Only mark yourself open 24 hours if somebody genuinely answers at 3am. A 24-hour listing that goes to voicemail earns you a one-star review from a person with water coming through their ceiling.

Business description

750 characters of free text, and it sits blank on most profiles. Write plainly: what you do, who you do it for, where, and what makes calling you different from calling the next one. No keyword stuffing. It reads badly to customers, and they are the audience that matters.

Photos

Not a one-time upload. Profiles that get fresh photos regularly look like operating businesses. Profiles with twelve photos from 2021 look closed.

Easiest version that works: whoever runs the job takes two photos on their phone before leaving, one of the finished work and one of the truck on site, and somebody uploads them weekly. Real and unstaged. Include a clear exterior shot and a photo of the actual crew, because those are the ones customers look at.

Products

Built for retail, and genuinely underused by trades. Each entry gets a photo, a title, a description and a link. You can put your actual offers here: a maintenance plan, a seasonal tune-up, a replacement consultation, a free estimate. They render as a visual block on the profile that almost none of your competitors have.

Questions & answers

Anybody can ask a question on your profile, and anybody can answer, including a competitor, and including somebody wrong. Left alone, this section fills with unanswered questions or bad information.

You are allowed to post your own questions and answer them. Seed the five you get asked on the phone every week: do you charge for estimates, how fast can you get out, do you work weekends, do you finance, what areas do you cover. Then check it monthly.

Messaging and the booking link

If you turn messaging on, somebody has to actually watch it. An unanswered chat is worse than no chat button, and Google will turn the feature off for profiles that consistently fail to reply.

The booking link is worth setting if you have somewhere real to send people. Point it at a page or scheduler that works on a phone in under thirty seconds. The people tapping this are usually standing in the problem.

Review replies

Reply to all of them, good and bad, in your own words. Copy-pasted “Thank you for your feedback!” under thirty reviews is visible from orbit and does you no favours with the human reading it.

For a bad one: answer once, publicly, calmly, with the facts and an offer to take it offline. You are not writing to the reviewer. You are writing to the next hundred people who read it while deciding whether to call you.

The part worth remembering

A profile is not a listing you create. It is a page you maintain. The contractors who win locally are almost never the ones with the cleverest strategy. They are the ones whose profile shows work from last week.

Written by Matt Pulliam, Southern Standard Systems. Wilmington, NC.