Your Google Business Profile is doing more work than your website
For showrooms, merchants and regional contractors, the free listing above the search results gets more attention than the site itself, and almost nobody maintains it.
Search for a trade and a town, then look carefully at what appears first. Not the blue links: the map, and the businesses listed beside it. For a large share of local and regional searches in this sector, that block gets more attention than everything below it put together, and it is populated entirely from a free profile most firms claimed once and then forgot.
It is the most neglected asset in built environment marketing. It costs nothing, it sits above pages people have spent thousands trying to rank, and in most towns the firms competing with you have not touched theirs in years.
Who this matters most for
Showrooms and merchants
The entire point is getting people through the door, and this is where those people are looking before they set off.
Regional contractors and installers
Searches pairing a trade with a place are how a great deal of subcontract and domestic work still begins.
Anyone with a trade counter or a yard
Opening hours, directions and whether you are open right now are the questions being asked, and the profile is where they get answered.
Firms competing with national brands
A well-maintained local profile is one of the few places a regional business reliably outranks a national one.
What actually moves it
Google is weighing three things: relevance, distance and prominence. Distance you cannot change. The other two you can, and most of the work is straightforward maintenance rather than anything clever.
Relevance comes from completeness. The right primary category, the secondary categories that genuinely apply, a description saying plainly what you do, services listed individually, and opening hours that are actually correct including bank holidays. Every empty field is a question left unanswered.
Prominence comes from reviews, and from the rest of the web agreeing that you exist. Reviews are the part firms find awkward and they are the part that moves it most: recent, regular and replied to. A profile with forty reviews from three years ago performs worse than one with fifteen from this year.
The maintenance nobody does
Photographs of the inside
Most profiles have one exterior shot from the street. Add interiors, the team, the yard, the work. Profiles with real photography get materially more interaction than those without.
Answering the questions
Anyone can post a question on your profile, and anyone can answer it, including competitors and passers-by. Left alone, this is a section of your marketing that somebody else is writing.
Replying to every review
Including the unkind ones, briefly and without arguing. The reply is not really for the reviewer. It is for the next person reading.
Keeping the hours honest
Wrong bank holiday hours generate exactly one thing, and it is a review from somebody who made the journey.
Posting occasionally
Updates appear on the profile and give Google something current to read. A completed project and a photograph, once a month, is enough.
How to ask for reviews without it being awkward
Most firms in this sector never ask, on the grounds that it feels like begging. The way around that is to make it a process rather than a favour. Ask at the moment the client is most pleased, which is usually at handover rather than at invoice, and ask by sending a direct link rather than explaining where to click.
Ask everyone, not only the projects that went perfectly, and never offer anything in exchange. A steady drip of ordinary, genuine reviews outperforms a burst of glowing ones, and it is far more durable when somebody looks at the dates.
If you work across several branches or depots, each one needs its own profile with its own address and hours. A single profile covering four locations competes properly in none of them.
What a profile cannot fix
It is worth being clear about the limits, because local search is sold badly and quite often to people who do not need it. The profile decides who appears in the map block for searches with a location behind them. It does nothing for national searches, nothing for specification searches and nothing at all for somebody who is not near you.
If you serve a region rather than an address
You can hide the address and set a service area, and that is the right setting for contractors who travel to clients. It also makes ranking harder, because distance still applies and you no longer have a pin to be near.
If the competition is genuinely local
Two firms in the same town with equally complete profiles are separated by reviews and by the strength of their websites. The profile is necessary and it is not sufficient.
If your website is the weak link
Google reads the site the profile points at. A thin, slow website limits how far a well-kept profile can carry you, which is why the two jobs are normally done together.
None of that is an argument for neglecting it. It is an argument for knowing exactly what it is: the cheapest and fastest visibility available for local intent, and one component of something larger.
The whole job is perhaps an hour to set up properly and twenty minutes a month to maintain. Set against a website costing thousands and a search position that takes a year to earn, it is the most disproportionate return available anywhere in local search, and it is sitting unused in almost every town in the country.
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