A contractor's Google Business Profile is the only ad that a lot of customers ever see, and most of them were filled in once, in a hurry, from the cab of a truck.
For a contractor, the Google Business Profile fields that matter most are the primary category, the services list, a service area with the address hidden if customers do not visit you, your real business name, and a steady stream of recent reviews with replies. Photos, hours and a phone that gets answered decide whether the people who find you actually call. The rest is mostly decoration.
What is the most important setting on a Google Business Profile?
The primary category. It tells Google what kind of business you are, and it is the strongest relevance signal you fully control. Google's own category guidance says to pick the one that best describes the business, then add a few additional categories for real departments or services, and not one for every product you sell.
For contractors that means picking the trade, not the marketing: Roofing contractor, Plumber, HVAC contractor, Electrician. If you do two trades, the one that brings most of your revenue is primary. A long tail of loosely related categories does not widen your net. It blurs what you are.
This guide assumes your profile is live and verified. If you cannot find it on the map at all, start with why a business stops showing up on Google Maps and come back.
Should a contractor show their address on Google?
Only if customers come to it. Most contractors are service-area businesses: you go to the customer. Google's profile guidelines say a service-area business should hide its address, and that the service area should not reach past about two hours of driving from where you are based. You can list up to 20 service areas by city or postal code.
One thing the service area does not do is make you rank in every town on the list. Distance from the searcher still counts. To show up in a town further out, you need something on your website that is about that town, which is the subject of how many city pages a contractor needs.
Which profile fields actually help rankings?
Split the profile into two kinds of field. Some help Google decide to show you. Others help a person decide to call.
- Help you show up: primary and secondary categories, the services list, the business description, the website link, and reviews, especially recent ones.
- Help you get the call: real photos of real jobs, accurate hours, a phone number someone answers, and replies under your reviews.
Link the website field to the page that matches your primary category. For most contractors that is the home page, but a plumber whose main work is water heaters should not be sending profile traffic to a page about drain cleaning.
Open your profile and check five things: is the primary category your main trade, is every service you bill for listed, is the address hidden if nobody visits, is the newest review from the last month, and does every review from the last year have a reply? Anything that is a no is your to-do list.
How often should you update a Google Business Profile?
Monthly at a minimum, and in small amounts. Add photos from jobs as they finish, post an update when you have something real to say, and reply to every review. Recency matters to the people reading it: we went through the numbers in how many Google reviews you actually need, and the short version is that the date on your newest review matters more than the total.
What gets a contractor's profile suspended?
The same few things, over and over:
- Keywords added to the business name, like "Plano's Best Roof Repair" after the real name.
- A virtual office or a mailbox used as an address.
- Two profiles for the same business, often one old and forgotten.
- Reviews that were paid for or swapped for a discount. Google's review policy calls incentives fake and misleading content.
A suspended profile disappears from the map until it is reinstated, which can take weeks, and every one of those weeks is calls going to the next name down. If you inherited a profile from a previous owner or an old marketing company, check who has access to it before anything else. Owners are often surprised to find a former vendor still listed as a manager.
What Wing Digital does with your profile
The Google Business Profile is the second half of the foundation in our Local SEO package: the right categories, services, service area, hours and photos, a review link for every finished job, and profile updates every month. It stays yours if you ever leave.