Why this matters more than most trades realise.
When someone in Sandwich types "emergency electrician" into Google at 7pm, they are not scrolling a website directory. They are looking at the map pack — those three business listings that appear above the organic results, complete with star ratings, phone numbers, and the distance from wherever they are standing. Get into that pack and the phone rings. Stay out of it and you might as well not exist online, however good your website is.
Google Business Profile (GBP, formerly Google My Business) is what determines whether you appear there. It is free, it is Google's own product, and it is one of the few places where a one-person trade in Faversham can genuinely outrank a national firm. The catch is that most small operators set it up in fifteen minutes, tick it off the list, and never touch it again. That is where the opportunity sits.
Claiming and verifying — get this right first.
Go to business.google.com, sign in with a Google account you will actually keep, and search for your business. If someone has already created a listing for you (it happens more than you would think, often from old directories), claim it rather than creating a duplicate. Two listings for the same business is one of the fastest ways to confuse Google and suppress both of them.
Verification is usually done via a postcode-matched postcard, though Google increasingly offers video verification or a phone call depending on your business type. The postcard takes about five days to arrive. Use your actual business address, not a virtual office — Google is getting better at spotting those, and an unverified or suspended listing ranks nowhere.
If you operate from home and do not want your home address published (very reasonable), you can set yourself as a service-area business. You list the towns or postcodes you cover — say, Canterbury, Whitstable, Herne Bay, and surrounding villages — and Google hides the address. The trade-off is that you lose some authority on hyper-local searches for your actual street, but for most mobile tradespeople that is a worthwhile swap.
Categories: the decision most people get wrong.
Your primary category is the single most influential field in your entire profile. Google uses it to decide what searches you are eligible to appear for. Most people pick something vague like "Contractor" or "Home Improvement" when they should be far more specific.
If you are a gas engineer, your primary category should be "Gas engineer", not "Plumber", unless plumbing is genuinely your main revenue stream. If you fit kitchens, "Kitchen remodeler" will outperform "General contractor" every time for kitchen-related searches. Spend ten minutes searching your competitors in Google Maps, click on the ones that rank well, and see what categories they are using. That is not copying — that is reading the market.
You can also add secondary categories. A plumber who also does bathroom fitting should have both. But keep the primary focused. Trying to be everything in one category field just dilutes the signal.
The profile fields that most people leave blank.
Once verification is done, most trades publish and walk away. The problem is that a sparse profile sends weak signals to Google's ranking algorithm and weak signals to potential customers reading it. Here is what actually gets filled in by the businesses that rank well.
Business description. You get 750 characters. Use them. Write in plain English, describe what you do, where you cover, and what makes you the person to call. Mention specific towns — "serving Canterbury, Deal, Sandwich, and the surrounding villages" — because Google reads this text and it does influence local relevance. Do not keyword-stuff; write it as if a human will read it, because one will.
Services. GBP lets you list individual services with descriptions and prices if you want them. A plumber might list Boiler installation, Leak detection, Emergency callouts, and Bathroom fitting as separate items. Each one is a small relevance signal for those search terms. Takes half an hour to fill in properly; most people skip it entirely.
Opening hours. Sounds obvious, but I have seen trade profiles with no hours listed, which Google sometimes interprets as "possibly closed". If you are available for emergency callouts outside normal hours, use the "More hours" feature to note that.
Photos. Profiles with photos get significantly more clicks than those without, according to Google's own published data. Ten good photos of your work — before and after on a recent job, your van with your number on the side, a photo of you — make the profile look real and busy. Blurry phone snaps are fine; you are not submitting to a design magazine. The goal is to look like an active, legitimate business.
Reviews: the part that actually wins jobs.
Star rating and review count are the two things a potential customer reads before anything else. A 4.9 with 47 reviews will almost always beat a 5.0 with 3, because the volume signals that the business is real and consistently good rather than just lucky.
The most reliable way to build reviews is embarrassingly simple: ask. Not via an automated email blast, but personally, at the end of a job. "If you are happy with the work, I would really appreciate a Google review — it helps a lot." Then send them a direct link. The direct link is important because the default Google search journey to leave a review has about four steps in it, and people drop off. Go to your GBP dashboard, find the "Get more reviews" button, and copy the short link it generates. Put that in your WhatsApp follow-up message after every completed job.
On responding to reviews: reply to all of them, including the negative ones. A polite, professional response to a critical review often impresses potential customers more than the review itself, because it shows you are a real person who cares. Never argue. Never offer to resolve it "offline" in a way that reads as damage control. Just acknowledge, explain calmly if there is context worth adding, and move on.
Posts, Q&A, and the features most people ignore.
Google Posts are short updates — offers, news, completed jobs — that appear on your profile in search results. They expire after a week or so, which means they reward the businesses that actually stay active. Posting once a fortnight with a photo of a recent job and two sentences about what the work involved is a low-effort signal that your business is current. It takes about three minutes per post and most of your competitors will not bother.
The Q&A section is stranger. Anyone can submit a question, and anyone (including you) can answer it. The odd part is that if you do not answer your own questions, Google sometimes auto-generates answers from your profile, or worse, members of the public answer on your behalf. Check it monthly. If there are no questions yet, seed it yourself by asking and answering the most common thing you hear from customers — "Do you cover Canterbury?" or "Do you offer free quotes?" — because these genuinely appear in the profile for searchers.
What to do when your ranking stalls.
GBP rankings are influenced by three things: relevance (does your category match the search?), distance (how far is the searcher from your listed location?), and prominence (how established and active does Google think you are?). If you have done everything above and you are still not in the map pack for your main search term, prominence is usually the gap.
Prominence signals include: your website's authority (having a real, properly built site with your business name, address, and phone number matching your GBP exactly does matter), mentions of your business name on other websites, consistent NAP (name, address, phone) across directories like Yell, Checkatrade, and Rated People, and the volume and recency of your reviews. A citation audit — checking that your business details are consistent across the twenty or so main UK directories — is dull work but it does move the needle. Checkatrade and Trustatrader are worth being on even independently of GBP, because they feed signals back.
Mind you, if you are a roofer in a town with four other active roofers who have all done the basics, you are fighting for three map pack spots with five competitors. At that point, the reviews become the differentiator. There is no shortcut past that.
When GBP alone is not enough.
Google Business Profile is not a substitute for a website — it is the entry point. Once someone clicks through to your site from a GBP listing, what they find there either confirms the decision to call or sends them back to a competitor. A profile that ranks brilliantly but links to a broken, slow, or vague website is leaving money behind.
The minimum viable website for a tradesperson is: who you are, what you do, where you cover, what to expect from working with you (process, typical timescales, how to get a quote), and a phone number or contact form that actually works on mobile. It does not need to be complicated. I have built effective trade sites in a week that do exactly this. The GBP profile and the website work together; one without the other is half the picture.