For most home service businesses, the Google listing brings in more calls than the website. These five fixes take an afternoon and keep paying off afterward.
For most home service businesses, the Google Business Profile brings in more calls than the website does. It's also the thing many owners set up once years ago and never open again, usually because they were busy running the business, which is a good reason. Here's what's worth an afternoon of your time.
The primary category does more work than anything else on the listing. It should name the service you most want to be called for, rather than the broadest label you can find. Add the secondary categories that apply and leave the rest alone. A long list of loosely related categories doesn't help you. Our guide to choosing Google Business Profile categories goes through it step by step.
List the towns you work in and are willing to drive to, and stop there. A service area stretched far past where you take jobs makes the listing less relevant everywhere, including near home.
Job photos do more than stock photos, and recent photos do more than old ones. Post a few every month straight from the truck. Before and after shots from real jobs do more for a homeowner deciding between two companies than any line of text on the profile.
Most profiles have three services filled in and forty left empty. Every service you offer should be listed with a short description in your own words. It's free space to say exactly what you do, and it feeds the searches you can appear for.
You can ask and answer your own questions on your listing, and you should. Take the five things customers ask on every call, put them there, and answer them plainly. Price ranges, scheduling, whether you're insured, and how long a job takes are good places to start.
Add a post when you have something real to share, like a finished job or a seasonal offer. Reply to every review. Add photos monthly. None of it is complicated, and it's the difference between a listing that looks maintained and one that looks abandoned.
Start with a free audit of your site and your Google listing. It costs nothing and you aren't signing up for anything.
