Google Business Profile for Trades: Fix the Six Things That Stop You Ranking

Before you conclude anything, make sure you are looking at what your customers see. Most owners search their own trade and town whilst sat in their own kitchen, signed into their own Google account, on a phone that has visited their own profile a hundred times. That result is personalised. It tells you almost nothing.

Those two answers send you down completely different paths, so run both searches before you change a single setting.

The two searches above tell you which half you are in. If the profile does not come up for your exact business name and town, look at verification, suspension and duplicates. If it comes up for the name but never for the job, look at category, service area and proximity.

In my experience they turn up roughly in the order below, most common first.

Reason one: the primary category is wrong#

This is the quiet one. The profile is live, complete and perfectly healthy, and still never appears, because the primary category is not one Google matches to the searches you care about. A roofer set as Construction company, or an electrician set as Handyman, is competing in the wrong pool.

Google leans heavily on the primary category to decide which searches a business is eligible for, so a mismatch is not a small penalty, it is a wall.

Reason two: the profile was never verified#

An unverified profile can exist, can be edited by you, and can still be invisible in search. Plenty of owners created a listing years ago, never finished the postcard or video step, and assumed it went live.

Open your dashboard, look for a verification banner or a Get verified button, and if you see one, that is your answer. Video verification is now common for trades: filming your van with signage, your tools, and business post showing the address you registered.

Reason three: the service area is blank or bloated#

If you work from home or a yard and do not want the address published, you should be a service area business, with the address hidden and the areas you cover listed. Two failures are common. The first is leaving the service area blank, which leaves Google guessing. The second is listing thirty towns across three counties because more must be better.

It is not. A sprawling service area dilutes the signal about where you are genuinely based, and Google still ranks you around your registered pin, not the edge of your list.

Reason four: a duplicate listing is splitting your history#

Duplicates appear when a business moves, when a previous agency created a second profile rather than claiming the first, or when Google auto generates one from other data. Two listings split your reviews and your history, and Google may pick the weaker one.

Search your business name, your old address and your phone number in Google Maps and count the results. If you find a duplicate, use Suggest an edit to report it as one, or contact support from the profile you own.

Reason five: the profile is suspended#

A suspension is the more alarming one. The profile disappears from search entirely and you get an email you may well have missed. The usual triggers are a keyword stuffed business name, a virtual office used as the address, sharing an address with another business in the same category, or an aggressive edit such as changing name and address on the same day.

Check the dashboard for a notice. If you find one, fix the underlying breach first, then appeal. Appealing whilst the name still reads Smith Roofing Leeds Emergency Roof Repairs will fail.

Reason six: you are too far from the searcher#

This is the honest one. Google Maps results are heavily influenced by how close the business is to the person searching. If you are based eight miles from the centre of a town, you are competing there against firms based in it, and for many searches you will simply not appear.

No setting changes this, no amount of posting fixes it, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What you can do is win the searches near your actual base and use ordinary website pages for the wider area. That is what the Local SEO for tradesmen service is built around.

Your primary category is the single biggest lever you control. Choose the most specific category that describes the work you actually want to be called about, not the broadest one that technically covers everything you do. Roofing contractor beats Construction company. Electrician beats Contractor.

If you mostly fit bathrooms and would rather not take drain jobs, Bathroom remodeler may serve you better than Plumber, even though you are a plumber.

Secondary categories are useful but not equal to the primary. Add the ones that genuinely describe services you offer, and stop. Twelve chosen from a keyword list will not push you up, and an irrelevant one attracts enquiries you do not want.

Services sit underneath categories and are underused. Google offers predefined services for most trade categories and lets you add custom ones. Add them, and write a short description for each. This is where the specific work goes:

For service areas, list the towns and postcode districts you would genuinely travel to at a sensible price, and keep it to a realistic working radius. If you want to be found across a much wider patch, that job belongs to dedicated location pages on your website, covered on the Local SEO for tradesmen page.

Reviews move the needle. Not just the count and the average, but the pace. A profile gaining a steady handful every month reads very differently, to Google and to a homeowner, than one that collected forty reviews in 2022 and nothing since. Steady beats sudden. Twenty arriving in one week after a push looks exactly like what it usually is.

The practical version is unglamorous: ask every customer at the moment the job finishes and they are happy, with a short link you text from the van. Not an email a fortnight later. Ask them to mention the job and the town in their own words, because review text is content Google reads, though never write it for them and never offer anything in exchange.

Photos matter less than people think, but they are not pointless. What helps is recent work you actually photographed on site: finished jobs, the van, the team. What does not help is twenty stock images of roofs, or the same six photos re uploaded. Add a few real ones a month and stop worrying about it.

Posts are the most oversold feature on the profile. A weekly post will not lift you up the map pack on its own. They earn their keep in two narrower ways: they occupy space when a customer is comparing three firms, and they suit seasonal offers or a note that you have emergency availability.

Write one when you have something real to say. Automating a post every Tuesday because a tool suggests it is busywork, and I would rather you spent that hour asking for reviews.

The quiet win is the questions and answers section, where you can ask and answer your own questions. Put the three things customers always ring to ask into it, in plain language:

Google describes local ranking with three factors, and they are worth understanding because they show you where effort is wasted.

You only choose where your registered address sits, and for most trades that was decided years ago when you bought the house. A roofer in a village will do well for the village and struggle in the city fifteen miles away, and the right response is to build the city presence through website pages rather than pretend the profile will stretch.

Relevance is squarely yours: primary category, secondary categories, services with descriptions, the words on the website you link to, and what your reviews actually say. Most trades invisible for a term they should own have a relevance problem, not a mystery.

Prominence rewards consistent mentions of your name, address and phone number elsewhere: trade bodies, local directories, suppliers, the local paper. Reviews contribute. So does your own website, which is why a profile attached to a thin three page site rarely competes with one attached to a proper site.

Once the profile is verified, clean and correctly categorised, optimisation is mostly completeness. Google rewards profiles that answer every question a customer might have, and most trade profiles leave a third of the fields empty.

Services with descriptions are the most commonly skipped field on the whole profile. Every service you offer, named the way a customer would say it, with two or three sentences underneath.

Opening hours come next, including special hours. Set your normal hours honestly, then set special hours for bank holidays, Christmas and the fortnight you shut in August. A profile marked open when you are not earns you a bad experience and occasionally a bad review, and Google favours businesses it believes are open right now for urgent searches. If you take emergency calls at midnight, say so, and back it with an out of hours number you will answer.

Attributes are the tick boxes: online estimates, onsite services, appointment required, wheelchair accessible entrance, languages spoken. Five minutes, and they occasionally appear as filters a customer can use. Tick the ones that are true.

Products are not obviously relevant to a trade, but the section works as a shop window for fixed price items: a boiler service, a landlord gas safety certificate, an EICR, a roof survey. Each gets an image, a name, a price or price range, and a description. It is one of the few reliable ways to look more substantial than a competitor.

The website link should point at a page that matches the profile, not automatically the homepage. If you have a strong service page for the work you most want, link there. If you run several profiles for genuinely separate premises, each should point to its own location page.

Run these in order rather than picking the one that sounds most like your problem. Optimisation work done on a duplicate or an unverified listing is work Google never sees.

That last distinction, between what the map pack can realistically give you and what needs pages behind it, is the basis of how I plan Local SEO for tradesmen.