Why does the primary category matter more than everything else?
Your primary category is the single most influential setting on the profile. It tells Google what your business fundamentally is, and it decides which searches you are eligible to appear for at all. Get it wrong and everything else you do is pushing against a closed door. Get it right and ordinary work still gets found.
Choose the category that matches the money you most want to make, not the broadest one available. Then add secondary categories for the other things you do, without padding. A long list of loosely related categories dilutes the signal. Check what the businesses ranking above you have chosen, because that information is public and it is often the whole answer.
Have you filled in services and products?
The services section is free, underused and directly useful. List every service by the name a customer would use, not your internal name, and write a short description for each. These entries help Google match your profile to specific searches and they appear to people comparing options. It is an hour of work, done once, and most businesses never do it.
Products are worth using even if you are a service business. A fixed-price item, a survey, a callout fee, a starter package: anything with a name and a number can go in. It gives people an answer to the price question before they ring, which quietly filters out the enquiries you did not want anyway.
- One entry per service, named the way customers say it.
- A short description for each, in plain words.
- Products with prices where anything has a fixed price.
- Attributes: wheelchair access, free parking, online estimates.
- A business description that reads like a person wrote it.
Are your opening hours actually right?
Wrong hours cost enquiries silently. Nobody rings to tell you they turned up to a closed shop. They go somewhere else, and leave a review about it if they are annoyed enough. Hours are also one of the details Google checks for freshness, so keeping them current is a small trust signal as well as basic courtesy.
Set special hours in advance for bank holidays, Christmas and any week you are away. Google prompts for these and most people ignore the prompt. If you close at lunch, say so. If you work by appointment only, set that rather than pretending to be open nine to five. Accuracy is worth more than looking available.
What should you do about photos and posts?
Add real photographs, taken by you, showing the premises, the team and the work. Exterior shots matter more than people expect, because someone needs to recognise your door when they arrive. Stock photography on a local profile is obvious and it undermines the thing a profile is for, which is proving you are a real business in a real place.
Posts are lower priority but not worthless. A short update every few weeks keeps the profile looking active and gives people something to read: a finished job, a seasonal note, an offer. Do not agonise over them. Twenty minutes a month is enough. A posts section that stopped two years ago says more than you want it to.
How should you ask for reviews and reply to them?
Ask at the moment of relief or delight, which is when the job is done and the customer is pleased. Not a week later by email. Use the short review link from your profile, send it by text, and say plainly that it helps. Most people will do it if they are asked once, directly, at the right time.
Replies matter as much as the reviews. A short, human reply shows you are paying attention and it is read by the next person deciding whether to call. Do not copy and paste the same line under thirty reviews. For a bad one, answer once, factually, offer to sort it offline, and leave it there.
- Get the short review link from your profile and save it in your phone.
- Ask in person first, then send the link the same day.
- Reply to every review, good and bad, within a few days.
- Keep replies to bad reviews short, factual and unbothered.
- Never buy reviews or offer anything in exchange for one.
Should you show an address or a service area?
If customers come to you, show the address. If you go to them, hide the address and set a service area covering the towns you genuinely cover. Do not do both badly. A tradesman listing a home address no customer will ever visit looks odd and can cause verification problems later.
Keep the service area sensible. Listing half the south east when you work across Rother and Wealden does not extend your reach, it just makes the listing less believable. Set the areas you would actually drive to on a Tuesday morning, and revisit it if that changes. Google does not reward optimism here.
What do you do about duplicate or unclaimed listings?
Duplicates split your reviews and confuse Google about which listing is real. They usually appear after a move, a rebrand, or a previous marketer creating one nobody told you about. Search your business name and your old address, check Google Maps directly, and look for anything carrying your phone number.
If you find a duplicate, report it through the profile as a duplicate rather than deleting anything yourself. If your listing exists but is unclaimed, claim it and go through verification, because an unclaimed listing can be edited by the public. Both jobs are tedious and both are worth doing once, properly.