Google Business Profile optimization for contractors, done right and kept that way

No matter which services you pick, this comes with it:

• Managing your Business Profile: posts, photos, services, hours, and fixing it when something breaks
• Review requests to every customer, and replies to every review
• Reporting fake competitor listings to Google
• Checking your name, phone and service area match your website, character for character

It’s real work. It just doesn’t show up on an ad report, which makes it easy for an agency to skip it or charge extra for it.

These are the settings I check first. Each one is a Google rule or a mistake I’d rather you not make.

1. Hide your home address. If customers don’t come to you, you’re a service-area business. Google says that if you don’t serve customers at your address, you should remove it from your profile and list your service area instead. Plenty of contractors work out of a home or a shop nobody visits. Your house doesn’t need to be on Google Maps.

2. Use your real business name. No “Best Plumber Salt Lake City” stuffed in. Google wants the name you use on your trucks, your website and your invoices, and it says adding extra info to the name isn’t allowed and can get a profile suspended.

3. Pick fewer categories. Google says to use as few categories as possible, pick the most specific one that fits your core business, and not use categories as keywords. A roofer listed under ten categories isn’t helping anybody.

4. Draw the service area you’ll actually drive. Not the whole state. If you won’t drive up Parleys Canyon for a small job, don’t list Park City.

5. Match your phone number everywhere. The number on your profile, your website and your directory listings should be the same. If call tracking is in use, your main number stays the main number.

6. Load real photos. Your jobs, your trucks, your crew. Stock photos make you look like everybody else.

7. List your services in plain words. “Water heater replacement,” not “comprehensive water heating services.”

Reviews matter to homeowners, and Google has clear rules about them. You can’t pay for reviews, even in kind. You can’t ask only your happy customers. And you can’t discourage bad reviews.

So here’s how I run it. Every customer gets a review request after the job, not just the ones you think will be nice. That keeps you inside Google’s rules. I can set those requests up to go out on their own with review request automation.

When a bad review comes in, I help you write a calm, short reply. A good reply to a bad review can say more about you than ten five-star ones.

Some competitors cheat. Fake listings at addresses with no business there. Business names stuffed with keywords. Phone numbers that go to a lead seller.

You can report a listing right from Maps with “Suggest an edit.” For misleading business names, phone numbers or websites, Google has a Business Redressal Complaint form. I file these as part of your plan. It’s slow, and Google doesn’t act on every report. I do it anyway, because a fake listing that comes down is one less competitor that was never real.

Your Business Profile and your Local Services Ads are connected. Name and address changes are made on the profile, and big changes can pause your ads for 24 to 48 hours while Google reviews them. That’s one more reason I don’t make careless edits. More on Local Services Ads.

• Handyman: small jobs, lots of them. Reviews and the map usually beat paid ads here.
• Concrete: no Local Services Ads category, so your profile does more of the work.
• Demolition: same story. No LSA category, so the profile and your site carry the load.