Someone two streets away has a dead socket and no idea who to ring. They type “electrician near me” into their phone, glance at the three businesses in the map box at the top, tap one, and ring it. Your website doesn’t come into it — they never scrolled that far.

That box is Google Business Profile, it’s free, and it’s the closest thing a local trade has to a shop window on the high street. Most trades either never claimed theirs or set it up in ten minutes years ago and haven’t touched it since. Here’s how to do it properly, and what to do with it once it’s live.

What actually decides who shows up

Google explains its local ranking in three parts, and it’s worth knowing which ones you can influence.

Relevance — how well your profile matches what was typed. This is the part you control most directly, through your categories and the services you list. If nothing on your profile says “EICR”, you’re unlikely to appear when someone searches for one.
Distance — how close you are to the searcher, or to the area they named. You can’t fake this, and trying to (see the fake-address trap below) is how listings get suspended.
Prominence — how well known and well regarded the business is. Reviews are the biggest lever here, plus mentions of you elsewhere on the web.

The honest summary: fill the profile in properly, then feed it reviews. Everything below is one of those two things.

Claim it, and get the basics right

Search your trade and your town on Google Maps. There may already be an unclaimed listing for you, auto-generated from an old directory entry or a customer’s suggestion. Claim it rather than creating a second one — duplicates split your reviews and compete with each other.

Verification usually means a short video walkthrough showing your van, tools and paperwork, or a code by post or phone. It’s a faff, and an unverified profile does almost nothing, so get it done in one sitting.

Then three settings that matter more than people expect.

Your business name is your business name. “Hall & Son Electrical” — what’s on the van, the invoice and the bank account. Not “Hall & Son Electrical | Emergency Electrician Sheffield | Rewires”. Stuffing keywords into the name is against Google’s guidelines, competitors report it, and profiles do get suspended for it. It’s a shortcut that costs you the whole listing.

If you work out of the house, hide the address and set a service area. Working from home is normal for a trade and Google supports it. Renting a virtual office in the city centre to look closer to the money isn’t supported, and it’s the fastest way to lose a profile you’ve spent two years building reviews on.

Set the service area to where you’ll genuinely drive. Listing every town within fifty miles doesn’t get you shown fifty miles away — it just fills your phone with jobs you’ll turn down.

Categories and services: the bit most trades get wrong

Your primary category carries real weight. Pick the specific one, not the vague one.

Instead of	Use as primary	Add as secondary
Contractor	Electrician	Electrical installation service, Security system installer
Home improvement	Bathroom remodeler	Plumber, Tiling contractor
Builder	Roofing contractor	Gutter cleaning service, Chimney services

Then fill in the services list underneath, because that’s where you get to use the words customers actually type. A sparks should have fuse board upgrades, EICRs, EV charger installation, outside sockets, fault finding, landlord certificates — each as its own entry with a sentence of plain description. A plumber: boiler servicing, leak detection, bathroom installation, outside taps, shower pumps, blocked drains.

One habit worth keeping: use the customer’s phrase rather than the trade’s. People search “fuse box”, not “consumer unit”.

Photos do more work than anything you’ll write

The profiles that get tapped look like a real business run by a real person. Upload your own work, regularly:

Before and after shots of finished jobs — with the customer’s permission if the inside of their house is recognisable.
Your van, clean, with the livery visible. It’s the thing they’ll see on the drive.
You and anyone who works with you. Someone deciding who to let into their home is buying a person, not a logo.

Stock photos of someone else’s kitchen are worse than no photos — they read as a business with nothing of its own to show. Take two shots on every job, one before you start and one when you pack up, and your photo library is sorted for the year.

Posts, Q&A and messages

Posts are short updates with a photo, and they sit on your profile for a while before dropping off. “Finished a full rewire on a 1930s semi in Handsworth this week — old rubber wiring right through, new board, certificated.” That’s thirty seconds of typing and it tells a stranger exactly what you do and where.

Q&A is the underused one. Anyone can ask a question on your profile — and you’re allowed to post questions yourself and answer them. Seed the ones you get asked on the phone every week: do you charge for quotes, are you insured, how far do you travel, how quickly can you come out, do you take card. That’s your objection handling done before the call.

Messaging is worth switching on only if you’ll reply within the hour. Google shows customers how responsive you are, and a message sitting unanswered until Thursday does you more harm than not offering it.

Reviews are the engine underneath

Prominence is mostly reviews, and reviews mostly come from asking at the handover rather than hoping. That’s a topic in its own right — how to earn and ask for reviews properly covers the timing, the wording and how to answer an unfair one. For the profile itself, two rules: keep them coming steadily rather than in one burst, and reply to every single one, because the replies are what a cautious customer reads.

The fifteen minutes a month that keeps it live

Put it in the diary for the first Monday of the month:

Reply to any new reviews.
Post one photo of a recent job.
Check your opening hours, and set special hours before Christmas and the bank holidays.
Answer anything new in Q&A.
Check the performance figures — how many people found you, how many rang, how many asked for directions. If calls are flat, it’s usually categories or reviews, not luck.
Look for “suggested edits”. Anyone can propose a change to your hours or address, and they sometimes go live.

Then get the rest of the machine right behind it. A profile that generates calls is wasted if the phone goes unanswered and the quote takes a fortnight — being quick to reply and quick to price is a large part of how you win work without being the cheapest. Pricing the job on site and sending a branded, itemised PDF before you leave the drive is exactly what Queezy is built for.

The mistakes that quietly kill a profile

Keywords stuffed into the business name.
A fake or virtual address, or a service area covering half the country.
Two listings for the same business, splitting the reviews between them.
A phone number that diverts to an old handset nobody checks.
Categories set once years ago, when you did a different sort of work.

The takeaway

Claim it, verify it, and spend a proper hour on the categories, services and service area. Put your own photos up. Seed the questions you’re sick of answering on the phone. Then collect reviews on every job and reply to all of them.

It’s the one marketing channel where the work compounds and the bill never arrives — which makes it the first thing to sort out if you’d rather not pay per lead for the privilege of being fourth in the queue.

Queezy is a quoting app for UK trades: build the quote room by room on site, send a professional itemised PDF before you leave, and see when it’s opened. Download it free on iPhone.

Get Found on Google: Your Business Profile, Done Right