If you only do one thing for your visibility this year, make it this. For a trade business, your Google Business Profile is worth more than your website for local search — and unlike a website, it costs nothing but an afternoon.
Here is the uncomfortable version: most tradies claim the profile, fill in three fields, and never touch it again. Then they wonder why the bloke two suburbs over is in the map pack and they aren’t.
Why the profile matters more than the site
When somebody searches “electrician near me” on a phone, the first thing they see is not the ordinary blue-link results. It is the map pack — a map with three businesses under it. That block sits above everything else, and on a phone it fills most of the first screen.
Those three positions are chosen mostly on the strength of the profiles themselves. Industry analyses of local ranking put Google Business Profile signals at roughly a third of the total weight, with review signals close behind. Your website matters, but it is supporting evidence rather than the main case.
The practical consequence: a tradie with a mediocre website and an excellent profile will usually beat a tradie with an excellent website and a neglected profile.
Get the primary category right
This is the single highest-leverage field in the whole profile, and it is the one most often set carelessly.
Google uses your primary category to decide which searches you are eligible for at all. “Electrician” and “Electrical engineer” are different categories that surface for different queries. If you pick the wrong one, no amount of reviews will rescue you, because you are not in the running.
A few rules:
- Pick the most specific category that describes your main work, not the broadest. Specific beats general.
- Your primary category should match what you want to be found for, not everything you are capable of.
- Add secondary categories for genuine additional services, but do not stuff them. Secondary categories carry far less weight and an obviously padded list looks like what it is.
If you do nothing else after reading this, open your profile and check whether the primary category is the one you would want a customer typing.
Fill in every field, not the easy ones
Google rewards completeness, and an empty field is a question a customer has to answer somewhere else — usually on a competitor’s listing.
Business name. Use your real trading name, exactly as it appears on your invoices and your ute. Do not append keywords. “Smith Electrical Perth Emergency Electrician 24/7” may nudge rankings briefly, but adding descriptors that are not part of your actual name is against Google’s guidelines and is one of the more common causes of suspension. Losing the profile entirely costs more than the keywords gain.
Phone number. Use one number, and make it the same number that appears on your website. If a call tracking number is used, use it consistently everywhere. An empty phone field on a trade profile is close to negligent — the whole point is to get the phone to ring.
Service area. If you travel to customers rather than having them come to you, set yourself up as a service-area business and list the suburbs you actually work. Do not list every suburb in the state. Google notices, and so do customers who ring expecting you to turn up.
Hours. Accurate, including public holidays. “Open now” is a filter people use, and being wrongly listed as open is worse than being listed as closed.
Services and description. Write out your services individually rather than as one lump. Describe them in the words customers use — “switchboard upgrade”, not “electrical infrastructure modernisation”.
Photos are not optional
A profile with no photos looks abandoned. A profile with ten real job photos looks like a business that turns up.
Post real work: before and after, the van, the crew, finished jobs. Avoid stock imagery entirely — homeowners can tell, and it undermines the one thing photos are there to establish, which is that you exist and you do this.
Add photos regularly rather than once. A profile that gets new images every few weeks signals an active business.
Reviews are the compounding asset
Review signals sit just behind profile signals in ranking weight, and the effect is dramatic at the top end. Analyses of local pack composition have found businesses with fifty or more Google reviews are several times more likely to appear than those with fewer than ten.
Two things matter more than most people realise:
Recency beats volume. A steady trickle of recent reviews outperforms a large pile collected two years ago. Google is trying to work out whether you are still good, not whether you were once.
Replies matter. Responding to reviews — including the bad ones, calmly — is a visible signal that the business is active and paying attention.
The reliable way to get reviews is to ask every customer, immediately, at the moment the job is finished and they are happy. Not next week. The gap between “job done” and “asked for review” is the single biggest determinant of whether you get one.
What to do this week
In order:
- Check your primary category is the one customers would search.
- Add your phone number if it is missing.
- Upload ten real photos of actual jobs.
- Set your service area to the suburbs you genuinely cover.
- Ask your last ten happy customers for a review.
None of that requires a marketer, a budget or a website change. It is the highest return available to a trade business for an afternoon of effort.
Once the profile is right, the website’s job is to back it up — consistent name, address and phone number, and pages that answer what the customer is about to ask.