How to claim your Google Business Profile as a tradesperson

The short answer

Search your business name on Google. If a listing comes up, claim it; if not, create one. Verify it by whichever method Google offers you, clear your home address so only your service area shows, then fill in the category, hours, phone and a few real photos. Fifteen minutes, free, and the most useful thing you will do online this year.

Why this is the first fix

When someone gets your name from a neighbour, the first thing they do is search it. What comes up is your Google Business Profile: the box with the name, the rating, the hours and the phone number. If it is not there, or it is there with the wrong hours and three photos from 2019, a lot of them go quiet. If it is there, claimed and tidy, they tap the number.

That is why we do this before anything else, before the Facebook page and long before a website. Google’s own help pages describe the profile as the way a business shows up in Search and on Maps, and for a trade that is where the calls come from. A plumber in Stockport does not need to be found by the whole internet. They need to be found by the person two streets away who just searched “plumber near me”.

Step one: find out whether a listing already exists

Search your business name and your town on Google. You are looking for a box on the right (on a phone, at the top) with your name in it. There are three things you might see.

• A listing with your name and a line saying “Own this business?”. Somebody, possibly a customer, possibly Google, created it. Tap that line and claim it.
• A listing that is already claimed, usually by you, years ago, on an email you have forgotten. Google’s help pages have a process for requesting access from the current owner, which starts from the same “Own this business?” route.
• Nothing at all. You create one from scratch, which is the same form as claiming.

Either way you need a Google account. Use one you will still have access to in five years, not a work email from a firm you might leave. This profile is worth more than most of what you own online.

Step two: verify it

Google will not show a claimed profile to the public until it has checked that you really run the business. Google decides which verification methods it offers you; you cannot pick. Its help page lists five: a phone call or text with a code, an email, a live video call with a Google representative, a postcard with a code (which Google says arrives within 14 days, and the code expires after 30), and a recorded video of the business.

For a trade, the video recording is the one you are most likely to be offered. Google wants to see the things that prove you are a real business in a real place: the van with the sign-writing, your tools, a job in progress, the paperwork with your business name on it. Ten minutes with your phone. Do it in daylight, do not narrate a sales pitch, just show the things.

Google’s page says its review of what you send takes up to five working days. Nothing about the profile is public until that comes back, so do this step first and set the rest up while you wait.

Step three: hide your address

This is the step most tradespeople get wrong, and it matters for two reasons.

If you work from home, you do not want your home address on a public map, and Google agrees. Its guidance for what it calls a service-area business, one that travels to customers rather than having a shop they walk into, is that you should clear the address from the profile and show the area you cover instead. A plumber working from a house in Bolton is the exact example Google gives.

The second reason is that a home address can get a profile suspended. Google treats a listing with a residential address and no customer-facing premises as a policy problem, and a suspended profile is far more work to recover than a clean one was to set up.

So: in the profile settings, remove the address and set up your service area instead. You can add towns or areas; Google’s guideline is that the whole service area should not stretch further than about two hours’ driving from where you are based. For a North West trade that is more than enough. Pick the towns you actually work in, not the ones you would like to.

Step four: fill in the fields that get you the call

Once verified, most profiles are left half empty. Fill these, in this order.

1. The primary category. This decides which searches you show up in. Pick the one that matches what you do most (“Plumber”, “Electrician”, “Roofing contractor”), then add up to a few secondary ones for the rest. Do not pick a broad one hoping to catch more searches; it has the opposite effect.
2. The phone number. The one you answer. If it goes to a voicemail nobody checks, the profile is doing harm.
3. Hours. Real ones. If you take calls until eight, say so; if you do not work Sundays, say so. “Open 24 hours” on a profile that goes to voicemail at six is the fastest way to a bad review.
4. The description. Two or three plain sentences: what you do, where, and one thing that makes you the safer choice (Gas Safe registered, twenty years in, family run). No list of towns padded in for search; Google’s policies are against it and it reads badly.
5. Photos. Ten real ones: the van, you, three or four finished jobs, a before and after. Taken on your phone, in daylight. No stock images, no logos as photos.
6. Services. Google lets you list what you do with a short line and, if you want, a price or a “from” price. Fill in the five or six jobs you do most.

What happens next

Within a day or two of verification you will start to see the profile in your own searches. The reviews come after that, and they are the subject of their own guide, because asking for them properly is a skill. The one thing to do now is to tell every customer you finish a job for that the listing exists. Most will look. Some will leave a review without being asked.

Keep the profile alive. Google notices a profile that gets a new photo every few weeks and a reply to every review, and so do customers. One photo a fortnight from a job you were doing anyway is enough.

Two things catch people out later. The first is a second listing: a customer, a directory or an old email of yours creates a duplicate, and your reviews end up split across two profiles. If you ever find one, Google’s help pages have a route for reporting a duplicate and merging it; do not just leave it. The second is a change of number or address that never reaches the profile. Every time something about the business changes, the profile is the first place to update it, because it is the first place a customer looks.

What to do next

Do this today, before anything else online: search your name, claim or create the profile, start the verification, clear your home address and set your patch. If you want us to do it with you, or check what you have already set up, get a free check-up and we will look at exactly what a customer sees.