The three results that are actually the page
When someone nearby searches for what you do, they do not see ten blue links. They see a map and three businesses. Everything under that is the second page in practice. Your Google Business Profile decides whether you are one of the three.
Categories do more work than keywords
Your primary category is the strongest single signal in the whole profile. 'Electrician' and 'Electrical installation service' are not the same market. Pick the primary category that matches the job you most want, add secondary categories for the rest, and do not pad it out with work you cannot service.
Services and service area, written properly
List your services individually, each with a real description, in the words customers actually use. Then set your service area to the suburbs you genuinely drive to. A service area stretched across three council areas tells Google you are nowhere in particular.
Photos are ranking, not decoration
Profiles with regular, real photos get more calls. Not stock — the switchboard you tidied up this morning, taken on the phone in your pocket, uploaded that week. Consistency matters more than quality.
Reviews: a process, not a plea
One short link, sent by text, the same afternoon the job is finished. That is the whole system. Then reply to every review, including the unfair one, calmly — because those replies are read by the next customer and by Google.
Then check what the machines say
Ask an AI assistant for a business like yours in your suburb. If you do not come up, or come up with the wrong hours, your profile and your website disagree somewhere. Fixing that is the newest and cheapest win in local marketing.
A tidy profile beats a clever campaign. Do the unglamorous hour first.
If you would rather not do any of this yourself, that is what we are for. We will audit your profile, tell you what is wrong with it, and quote to fix it — or tell you it is fine and charge you nothing.
6 Comments
How often should photos go up? Weekly feels like a lot when you are on the tools all day.
Fortnightly is plenty, and two or three shots at a time is fine. Consistency beats volume — a photo every second week for a year outperforms forty in one afternoon.
dv
The review-by-text tip is the one that changed things for us. Took a month to build the habit but the difference in the map pack was obvious.
Good read. I service about six suburbs but only have one address — is it worth listing all of them as a service area, or does that water it down?
List the ones you genuinely drive to and no more. Six is fine if they are contiguous. It waters down when the area sprawls across council boundaries you would never actually take a job in.