For a local trade business, your Google Business Profile is worth more than your website.
That is not a figure of speech. When someone searches “electrician near me”, the three map results sit above everything else on the page, and most people pick from those three without scrolling. Your profile decides whether you are in them.
The good news is that it is free, it takes an afternoon, and most of your competitors have half-finished theirs.
How Google actually decides who shows
Google publishes this, so we are not guessing. Their own documentation gives three factors:
- Relevance. How well your profile matches what was searched. This is what you control most directly, by filling the thing in properly.
- Distance. How far you are from the searcher, or from the area they searched. You cannot change your address, but you can change what area you tell Google you serve.
- Prominence. How well known you are. Reviews, mentions elsewhere on the web, and your general footprint feed this.
Almost everything below is aimed at the first and third, because those are the two you can actually move.
The checklist
1. Claim and verify it
If you have not verified the profile, nothing else matters, because you cannot edit it. Verification is usually a postcard, a phone call or a video these days depending on the business type. Do this first, and do it under an email address you will still control in five years. Not an old staff member’s.
2. Get the business name exactly right
Use your real business name. Not “Auckland Plumbing | Emergency Plumber 24/7 Cheap Rates”.
Stuffing keywords into the name does work in the short term, which is why you see it everywhere, and it is also against Google’s guidelines and gets profiles suspended. A competitor can report you in about thirty seconds. Not worth it.
3. Pick the right primary category
This is the single highest-impact field on the whole profile, and it is the one most people get lazy about.
Your primary category should be the thing you most want to be called for. “Plumber” and “Drainage service” are different categories and will surface you for different searches. Add secondary categories for the other services you genuinely offer, but choose the primary one deliberately.
Look at what the businesses currently ranking above you have chosen. It is public.
4. Set your service area properly
If you travel to customers, set service areas rather than relying on your shop address. List the towns and suburbs you actually work in, not the whole region out of optimism. Google gives less weight to a business claiming to serve everywhere.
For most Hawke’s Bay trades that means naming Napier, Hastings and Havelock North separately, because people search them separately.
5. Fill in every service
There is a services section and almost nobody completes it. Add each service as its own entry with a short description. This is free relevance for the exact phrases people search: “hot water cylinder replacement”, “switchboard upgrade”, “roof repairs”.
If you offer fifteen things, list fifteen things.
6. Put your real photos up
Not stock images. Photos of your actual vans, your team and your finished work. Profiles with real photos get more clicks, and it is the fastest way to look like a real business rather than a listing.
A practical habit: take one photo at the end of every job you are proud of. Ten minutes a month of uploading beats a single photo session that never gets repeated.
7. Get reviews, steadily
Reviews feed prominence, and recency counts as well as volume. Twenty reviews spread across two years beats thirty reviews that all arrived in one week in 2023.
Build the ask into your job completion so it happens without you remembering. Our guide on how to ask for Google reviews covers the wording that actually works, and getting reviews without begging covers the timing and the system behind it.
Reply to every review, including the bad ones, calmly. Prospects read the replies.
8. Keep the hours accurate, including holidays
Wrong hours cost you jobs and annoy people enough to leave reviews about it. Set your public holiday hours in advance, because New Zealand has a lot of them and Google prompts customers about it.
9. Use the Q&A section
You can ask and answer your own questions, and it is entirely legitimate. Put the five questions you get asked every week up there with proper answers: whether you charge for quotes, what your callout fee covers, which areas you cover, how fast you can get there.
10. Post occasionally
Posts are a minor factor, but they are visible and they signal an active business. Once a fortnight is plenty. A finished job with two photos and three sentences is a fine post.
One thing worth knowing about the data
Your profile shows you a breakdown of the searches people used to find you, and it is easy to misread.
Only the top term has a real count. Below that, Google buckets anything under a threshold and lists those terms alphabetically, not by volume. So the list you are looking at is not a ranked top ten, and treating it as one will send you off optimising for a term that got two searches because it happened to start with the letter A.
Read the top line, treat the rest as a rough vocabulary list, and do your actual keyword research elsewhere.
What this will not do
Being straight with you about the ceiling.
A perfect profile puts you in contention. It does not beat a competitor with four times your reviews and ten years in the same location, because distance and prominence are real and you cannot fill in a form to fix them.
It also does nothing for searches without local intent. Someone researching “how much does rewiring cost” is not looking at the map pack, and that is where your website and content do the work. Our SEO services page covers the wider picture.
But for the searches that matter most to a local trade, the ones with “near me” or a town name attached, this is the highest-return afternoon you will spend on marketing all year. It is free, and most of your competitors have not bothered.
Once the profile is complete and you are still not in the top three, the next question is a different one: what decides the order. That is covered in how to rank in the map pack.
Google Business Profile FAQ
How long does it take to see results?
Profile changes can surface within days, which is much faster than website SEO. Review growth and prominence build over months. If you complete the checklist above you would typically expect to see movement in map pack visibility within a few weeks.
Do I need a physical address?
No. If you travel to customers you can run a service area business and hide your address, which is what most tradies working from home should do. You still need a real address to verify with, Google just will not display it.
Can I have more than one profile?
Only for genuinely separate locations with a distinct address and staff. Creating multiple profiles for the same business to cover more towns is against the guidelines and gets them all suspended. Use service areas instead.
Do posts actually help my ranking?
Only slightly, on the evidence available. They help more with looking active to someone already viewing your profile. Do them, but do not let them crowd out reviews and photos, which matter more.
What is the fastest single improvement?
For most trade profiles it is a toss-up between fixing the primary category and completing the services section. Both take under an hour and both directly feed relevance.
Should I pay someone to manage this?
If you have an afternoon, do it yourself. The checklist above is genuinely the bulk of it. Where it becomes worth paying for is the ongoing part: keeping reviews flowing, posting, answering questions and watching the competition, month after month, which is the bit that quietly stops happening when you get busy.
Want us to look at your profile against the businesses beating you? Get a free game plan: 20 minutes with Ryan or Matt, and you will get the list of what to fix whether you work with us or not.