How to set up a Google Business Profile as a tradesperson

Check whether Google already has you

Before you create anything, open Maps on your phone and search your business name, then your mobile number. Google assembles unverified listings out of places it has seen a business mentioned, so there is a fair chance one already exists with your details on it.

If there is one, claim it instead of starting fresh. Any reviews sitting on it come with it, and reviews are the hardest thing in this whole exercise to accumulate. Two listings for one business split them between you and yourself, and Google eventually merges or removes one without asking which you preferred.

If nothing comes up, you are creating a new one, which you do from google.com/business or from the Maps app. There is no separate app to download any more. Once you are signed in to the account that owns it, the profile is edited directly from Search and Maps.

The address question, which is where most trades give up

This is the step people abandon at, and it has a clean answer. If customers do not come to your premises, you are a service-area business, and a service-area business does not display an address at all.

You still enter one during setup, because Google needs to know where you are based and it affects which searches you turn up in. You then clear it from the public profile. What a customer sees is the list of places you work, not the street you live on.

Set the area yourself rather than leaving it empty. If you leave it, Google picks a local area for you, and what it picks is not necessarily what you would have chosen. You can list twenty, given as towns, cities or postcode districts.

There is a limit on how far that stretches. Google's guidelines put the outer edge at about two hours of driving from where the business is based, so a plumber in Leeds listing Bristol is outside the rules whether or not they would do the drive. Changes to the area can take a couple of days to show up.

One thing that is not allowed, and it is worth being blunt about because it is sold as a tactic: renting a mailbox or a virtual office in a town you want work in and listing that. A service-area business cannot use an address it does not actually staff. It gets caught, and it gets the listing suspended rather than quietly corrected.

Verification, and you do not get to pick the method

Nothing shows publicly until the profile is verified. The routes are a code by phone call or text, a code by email, a live video call, a postcard through the door, and instant verification if you already own the website and have it verified in Search Console.

Which of those you are offered is decided by Google and varies by business type and location. People assume they have done something wrong when the option they expected is missing. They have not. It was never on their menu.

If you get the video call, it is a real person, live, in working hours, and they want to see the business is real: signage on the van if you have it, tools, stock, and that you have access to the things somebody running this business would have access to. Do it from the van or the workshop rather than the kitchen table.

A postcard takes up to a fortnight and the code stops working after thirty days. While you are waiting, leave the name, the address and the category alone, because changing any of them starts the whole thing again.

If a verification fails, appeal it. Do not delete the listing and make another. A fresh listing on a new account is the exact pattern Google associates with people working the system, and it leaves you worse off than the appeal would have.

The category field is doing most of the work

You get one primary category and up to nine more. The primary is not a label. It is most of what decides which searches the profile is even eligible for, and it is the most consequential box on the form.

Take the one that names the work you want more of rather than the broadest thing that is technically true. A bathroom fitter whose primary reads Contractor is entered in a race that means nothing against everybody. Set to the specific one, they are in the right race.

Google's own guidance is to use as few as you can, and to ask whether the business is the thing rather than has the thing. You are a plumber. You are not a boiler.

The additional ones are for separate work you would genuinely take a call about, not an inventory of everything you could do at a push. Padding the list dilutes it rather than widening it. There is a guide in this series on picking the category for each trade, and it is worth ten minutes before you commit.

What to fill in before you walk away

The profile goes live half empty if you let it, and a half empty one converts badly even when it ranks. These are the fields worth the extra twenty minutes on the first day.

• Services, entered one at a time rather than as a paragraph. They are what somebody scans, and they are searchable text.
• Hours you will actually answer inside. A customer who rings during your stated hours and gets voicemail does not ring back.
• Photographs of finished jobs, captioned with what it was. Not a logo, and not the stock photograph of a wrench that appears on every other profile.
• The short review link, copied out of the dashboard and saved into your phone, so that asking somebody costs one text message.
• Messaging, switched on only if you will answer it. An ignored message button is worse than none.
• A description of what you do and where, written without adjectives. It is not a ranking field, so write it for the person reading it.

The two things that get a trade listing suspended

Almost every suspended trade listing comes down to one of two things, and both look harmless to whoever is doing them.

The first is the business name. Google wants the name on your van and your paperwork and nothing else: no town, no trade, no strapline, no phone number. "Dave Morris Plumbing" is a name. "Dave Morris Plumbing Leeds Emergency 24hr" is a keyword list, and it is the single most reported profile shape there is, usually reported by a competitor who is losing to it.

The second is an address you do not work from. A relative's house in the next town, a mailbox, a friend's unit. That one gets the listing pulled rather than edited, and the reviews go with it.

Neither is worth it. An appeal takes weeks and is not guaranteed, and the thing you are gambling is the review history, which took a year to build and cannot be moved anywhere else.

The month after setup

Setting it up is an afternoon. What makes it work is the month afterwards, and nearly all of that is one habit: asking for a review at the moment a job is finished, while the customer is standing in front of it and pleased.

• Ask the next three customers, on the spot, with the link already open on your phone.
• Add a photograph whenever you finish something worth photographing. A profile whose newest picture is three years old reads as a business that has stopped.
• Reply to every review, including the good ones, in a line. It is public and it costs nothing.
• Look at the profile once a month for edits. Anybody can suggest a change to your hours or your category, and it can go live without telling you.
• Do not buy reviews and do not offer a discount for one. Incentivised reviews breach the policy, they get stripped when noticed, and a customer who spots the offer stops believing the honest ones.