When a customer searches for a local service, your Google Business Profile often shows up before your website does. It's the card with your name, your star rating, your hours, and a button to call. For a lot of people, that card is the whole first impression.
Most service businesses set their profile up once, years ago, and haven't touched it since. That's the easiest win in local search, because a profile that's complete, accurate, and current beats one that's neglected, and almost nobody is doing the work. Our post on local SEO for Ohio service businesses covers where the profile fits in the bigger picture. This one is the hands-on version: what to check, in what order, and what to set before the holidays.
Why Your Profile Can Matter More Than Your Homepage in Local Search
Google says it uses three things to rank local results: relevance, distance, and prominence. Relevance is how well your profile matches what someone searched for. Distance is how far you are from the searcher. Prominence covers things like your review count and links to your business from other websites (Google Business Profile Help).
You can't change where the customer is standing, but you control most of the rest. Google states that businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up in local results, and that if your information isn't accurate, your profile might not show up for relevant searches in your area. The same page is blunt about one more thing: there's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.
That's good news. It means the ranking factors you can influence come down to doing the basics well and keeping them current. The rest of this post walks through them.
Get the Basics Exactly Right: Name, Categories, Service Areas, Hours
These four fields do the most work, and they're also where most of the mistakes are.
Your business name
Use your real-world business name, the one on your truck, your invoices, and your website. Google's guidelines say your name should reflect your business's real-world name, and that including unnecessary information in it isn't permitted. That means no taglines, no phone numbers, no hours, no URLs, and no location details tacked on (Guidelines for representing your business on Google).
It's tempting to add "Plumber Canton Ohio" to your name to pick up searches. Don't. It's against the guidelines, and it can get your profile suspended.
Categories
Your primary category is the single most important choice on the profile. Google says the categories you select affect your local ranking, and it tells you to pick the one that best describes your business, and to choose the most specific option available. Its own example: choose "Nail salon" instead of "Salon" (Choose a business category).
A few rules that keep you out of trouble:
- You can't write your own category. You choose from Google's list.
- Additional categories are for real secondary parts of your business, not a keyword list. Google says not to select a category for every product or service.
- The guidelines suggest a simple test: the category should complete the sentence "This business is a ..." rather than "This business has a ...".
For most service businesses, that means one precise primary category and one or two additional ones at most. A landscaper who also plows snow might add a snow removal category. They shouldn't add ten loosely related ones.
Service areas
If you travel to customers instead of serving them at your location, set a service area. In your profile, go to Edit profile, then Location, and edit the Service area. Google's rules are specific (Service area businesses):
- You can set up to 20 service areas, based on cities, postal codes, or other areas.
- You can't use a radius around your business.
- Your overall area shouldn't extend more than about two hours of driving time from your business.
- If you don't serve customers at your address, remove the address from your profile and list only the service area.
Approved edits can take up to 48 hours to appear, so don't panic if a change doesn't show right away.
Be honest about this list. Claiming towns you don't actually serve doesn't help you, and the towns you do serve are exactly the ones you'll want dedicated pages for later. We'll cover that in a coming post.
Hours
Enter your regular, customer-facing hours, and keep them current. If you take calls on weekends but only do jobs on weekdays, list the hours when a customer can reach you. The hours you list are what people plan around.
Services, Description, and Photos
Once the basics are right, fill in the parts that tell people what you actually do.
Services
Google lets you list the services you offer, and for customers searching on Maps, the full list appears under a "Services" heading. In your profile, select Edit services and pick from the suggestions for your business type, or add a custom service if yours isn't listed. Each one can have an optional description and an optional price (Manage your services).
Services are only available for certain business categories, so if you don't see the option, check that your category is set correctly first. And keep custom service names clean: Google says to avoid profanity, gibberish, personal information, prices, or phone numbers in them.
Description
Write the business description for a customer, not for Google. Say what you do, who you do it for, and where. Two or three plain sentences beat a paragraph of keywords. Google's guidelines also don't allow links in the description, so leave your web address for the website field.
Photos
Photos are one of the few things on your profile that prove you're real. Google supports a logo, a cover photo, and general business photos. Use your own: your vehicles, your crew at work, finished jobs, and your storefront if you have one (Manage your photos and videos).
The technical requirements are simple:
- JPG or PNG, between 10 KB and 5 MB
- 720 by 720 pixels recommended, 250 by 250 as the minimum
- In focus and well lit, without heavy filters or alterations
- Videos can be up to 30 seconds and 75 MB
Photos can take 24 to 48 hours to appear, and they only show publicly once your profile is verified.
Reviews and Replies
Reviews belong in two places in your routine: getting them and answering them.
Google notes that more reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking, and that replying to reviews shows customers you value their feedback. To reply, you need a verified profile. Select Read reviews, click the reply icon next to the review, write your response, and select Reply. Google checks replies against its content policies, which usually takes up to 10 minutes (Manage customer reviews).
The bigger question is how to get more reviews without breaking Google's rules. We wrote a full guide on exactly that: how to get more Google reviews. The short version is to ask every customer, never offer anything in exchange, and reply to everything.
Keep It Active with Updates
A complete profile that never changes looks the same as an abandoned one. Google Business Profile posts are a lightweight way to show that someone is home.
To create one, select Posts, then Add post. You can choose an Update, an Offer, or an Event, and you can use Schedule this post to set it up ahead of time. One thing to know: Google archives posts older than six months unless you set a date range, so a post isn't permanent (Create a post for your Business Profile).
Good things to post are short and real:
- A finished project with a photo
- A seasonal reminder, like getting equipment serviced before winter
- A change in availability or hours
- A new service you've started offering
Keep it professional and skip phone numbers in the post text, because Google says posts that include one might get rejected if it can't be tied to your business. Once a month is plenty if that's what you'll actually keep up.
Set Special Hours Before the Holidays
This is the one to do today. Holiday weeks are when customers are most likely to check whether you're open, and a profile showing the wrong hours costs you the call and the trust.
Google lets you schedule special hours ahead of time (How to set special hours):
- Go to your Business Profile and select Edit profile, then Hours.
- Click the pencil icon next to Special hours.
- Select Review for Google's suggested dates, or Add a date for your own.
- To stay open, uncheck Closed and enter the hours. To stay closed, leave Closed checked.
- Select Save.
Dates worth setting this year:
- Thanksgiving, Thursday, November 26
- Christmas Eve, Thursday, December 24, and Christmas Day, Friday, December 25
- New Year's Eve, Thursday, December 31, and New Year's Day, Friday, January 1
A few details from Google's instructions that catch people out:
- When special hours cover a day, your regular hours for that day are ignored. If you're open that day, enter the hours you want shown.
- Special hours can cover up to six days in a row. For a closure of seven or more days, use Temporarily closed instead.
- Your hours need to be set to "Open with main hours" for special hours to display.
- Google recommends confirming your hours for official holidays even when they match your regular hours.
Set these now, while it takes ten minutes, instead of the week of.
The Short Version
If you only do five things this week:
- Check that your business name matches your real-world name exactly, with nothing extra added
- Confirm your primary category is the most specific one available
- Set your service areas, and remove your address if you don't serve customers there
- Add real photos, and list your services
- Set special hours for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's
Everything else in this post is worth doing, but those five protect you from the most common ways a profile quietly loses calls.
If you'd like someone to look at your profile and tell you what to fix first, the free web presence audit reviews your Google Business Profile, your website, and your local visibility, and gives you a prioritized list. And if you'd rather hand the ongoing work to someone, here's how our SEO and marketing service works.