Set up your Google Business Profile so local customers can find you and call

If you're a plumber, electrician, roofer or builder, your Google Business Profile might bring in more calls than your website.

It's the listing that appears in the map box when someone searches "electrician near me". It shows your reviews, your phone number and a button to call you, right there in the results. Plenty of customers tap that button without ever visiting a website.

It's free. And for something so important, it's surprisingly easy to set up badly.

Quick answer: Create or claim your profile at google.com/business. Use your real trading name with nothing added. If you visit customers, hide your home address and set a service area. Pick the most specific main category you can. Fill in every section, add real photos, and ask happy customers for reviews. Then keep it up to date.

Three things tradespeople worry about. We'll cover all of them:

• Do I have to show my home address to the world?
• Why do some competitors have "Plumber Cardiff" in their name, and should I?
• What actually makes one profile show above another?

Do you even qualify?

Most trades do. Google's Business Profile guidelines say a business can have a profile if it has a location customers visit, or if it travels to customers.

A few situations don't qualify:

• A virtual office or a mailbox you don't actually work from.
• More than one profile for the same business, unless you have genuinely separate locations.

If you're a sole trader working out of your van, you qualify.

The home address question

This is the one that puts most people off, so let's deal with it first.

If you visit customers rather than having them come to you, Google calls you a service-area business. Its guidelines say service-area businesses should hide their address and set a service area instead. Google's own example is a plumber running the business from home.

So no, you don't have to show your home address. You'll still need to give Google an address so it can verify you're real, but you can choose not to display it.

Setting your service area

You can list towns, cities or postcode areas you cover. A few tips:

• Be realistic. Google's guidelines say service areas generally shouldn't stretch beyond about two hours' drive from your base.
• List places people actually search for. "Barry", "Penarth", "Cardiff" and "Vale of Glamorgan" are clearer to a customer than a list of tiny villages.
• Don't expect a big service area to put you top of the results everywhere. Distance still matters, as we'll see.

The name mistake that gets profiles suspended

Here's the second question. You've probably seen competitors listed as something like "Smith Plumbing | Emergency Plumber Cardiff 24/7".

Google's guidelines are clear: your business name should match the name you use in the real world, on your van, your invoices and your signs. They specifically list things you shouldn't add, including taglines, opening hours, phone numbers and descriptions of your services or location.

Breaking that rule can get a profile suspended. When that happens, you vanish from the map until it's sorted out, which can take time.

So if your business is called "Smith Plumbing", call the profile "Smith Plumbing". Put "emergency plumber" and "Cardiff" in the categories, the description and your service area, where they belong.

Worth knowing: if a competitor is breaking the name rules, Google has a way to suggest an edit to their listing. That's their problem to sort out, not a reason to copy them.

Choose your categories carefully

Categories tell Google what kind of business you are. They're one of the main ways Google decides whether your profile matches a search.

Google's guidance is to use as few categories as possible and make them as specific as you can. It suggests a simple test: the category should complete the sentence "This business IS a...".

So:

• "This business is a plumber" works.
• "This business is a boiler repair" doesn't. That's a service, not a type of business.

Pick the most specific main category that fits. If you're mainly a heating engineer who also does plumbing, consider whether a heating-related category describes you better than a general one. Then add a small number of secondary categories only if they genuinely describe what your business is.

Services you offer go in the Services section of the profile, not in the categories.

Fill in every section

Empty sections are wasted chances. Work through the profile and complete:

• Phone number. One you'll actually answer, or that goes to a voicemail you check.
• Website. Link to your home page or a relevant services page.
• Opening hours. Including whether you offer emergency callouts.
• Services. List each service in plain words, with a short description.
• Description. A few honest sentences about what you do, where, and what makes you a safe pair of hands. No keyword lists.
• Photos. Your van, your work, your team, before-and-after shots. Real photos you took, not stock images.

Google's help page on improving your local ranking says businesses with complete and accurate information are easier to match with the right searches. Filling in the profile is one of the few ranking factors entirely in your hands.

What decides who shows up first?

Now the third question. Google's help page says local results are mainly based on three things.

Relevance. How well your profile matches what someone searched for. Good categories, services and a clear description help here.

Distance. How far you are from the searcher, or from the location they searched for. You can't change this, which is why someone with a smaller service area can still beat you near their base.

Prominence. How well known your business is. Google says this draws on things like reviews, links and articles about you across the web.

The same help page also says something many people find reassuring: there's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. Anyone promising to buy you the top spot is making it up.

Reviews: the part that compounds

Reviews feed prominence, and they also persuade the person reading your profile to call you rather than the next one.

The rules are simple, and they're worth knowing because breaking them can get reviews removed. Google's policy on fake engagement says businesses must not:

• Offer incentives, such as discounts or freebies, in exchange for reviews.
• Ask only happy customers to review, while steering unhappy ones away.
• Pressure customers to review while you're standing there.

What you can do is ask every customer for an honest review, and make it easy. Google lets you share a link or QR code that takes customers straight to the review form. Send it in a text after the job, or print the QR code on your invoice.

Reply to reviews too, including the critical ones. A calm, helpful reply to a bad review often reassures a reader more than a wall of five-star ones.

Link your profile and your website together

Your profile and your website do different jobs, and they work better together.

• The profile gets you seen in the map results and lets people call straight away.
• The website answers the questions people have before they call: what exactly you do, what it costs, whether you're trustworthy.

Make sure the name, phone number and area on your profile match what's on your website. And make sure the website does its part. If people tap through from your profile and land on a page that doesn't tell them what to do next, my guide to websites that get visitors but no enquiries explains how to fix it.

Keep it alive

A profile isn't a one-off job. Every month or so:

• Add a few new photos of recent work.
• Check your hours, especially around bank holidays.
• Reply to any new reviews.
• Check nobody has suggested an edit that changed your details.

Ten minutes a month keeps the profile accurate, and an accurate profile is one Google can confidently show.

If your profile isn't showing at all

If you've set everything up and you're still missing from the map, it may not be verified, it may have been suspended, or the problem may be elsewhere. My guide on why a business doesn't show up on Google works through the checks in order.