The Google Business Profile checklist for local contractors

When someone in your town searches "kitchen remodeler near me", the first thing they see isn't anyone's website. It's the map with three businesses in it. Getting into that box is worth more than almost any other free marketing you can do, and it's decided largely by your Google Business Profile.

Most contractors claim their profile, fill in half of it, and never touch it again. Here's the rest of the checklist.

The foundations

• Claim and verify it. Unverified profiles don't compete. If you've moved or changed your number since verifying, do it again.
• Exact, consistent contact details. Your business name, address and phone should be written identically everywhere online. Inconsistency is one of the most common quiet ranking problems.
• Pick the right primary category. This is one of the strongest signals you control. "Kitchen remodeler" and "General contractor" produce very different results. Choose the one that matches the work you actually want, then add secondary categories.
• Set a real service area. If you travel to customers, list the towns you genuinely serve. Don't list your whole province hoping for reach, it dilutes you.
• Hours, including holidays. Wrong hours cost you calls and annoy people.

The parts people skip

• Services list. Enter every service individually with a short description. This is free text that Google reads and that customers browse.
• Business description. 750 characters describing what you do, where, and for whom. Write it for a human, mention your trade and your area naturally.
• Photos, lots of them. This is the highest-leverage thing on the list and the most neglected. Real job photos, before and after, your crew, your truck. Profiles with fresh photos get meaningfully more engagement. Add some every month.
• Products or project highlights. Use them to showcase specific jobs with photos and price ranges.
• Messaging. If you enable it, you must answer fast. Turning it on and ignoring it is worse than leaving it off.

Reviews, the ranking factor everyone underestimates

Review count, rating and recency all feed local ranking, and they're the first thing a human judges too. A steady trickle beats a burst: twenty reviews spread over a year signals a living business better than twenty in one week, which can look manufactured.

Reply to all of them. Google explicitly encourages engagement, and prospects read your replies. Never buy reviews, and never solicit only your happy customers, both violate Google's policies and can get your reviews filtered.

Google Posts: free space nobody uses

You can publish short updates with a photo and a link, offers, finished projects, seasonal reminders. They appear on your profile and signal activity. A post a week is plenty. Most of your competitors post never, so the bar is low.

Q&A: answer your own questions

Anyone can ask a question on your profile, and anyone can answer, which means wrong information can sit there unchallenged. Seed it yourself: post the five questions you're asked on every call, do you offer free estimates, are you licensed and insured, what areas do you serve, and answer them properly.

Keep it alive

Google favours profiles that show signs of life. Photos, posts, new reviews, answered questions, updated hours. Fifteen minutes a month puts you ahead of nearly every competitor in your area, because almost none of them do it at all.

Then answer the phone

One warning worth saying plainly: a great profile increases your calls. If those calls ring out to voicemail, you've spent your effort filling a leaky bucket. Fix the answering side at the same time, or you'll do all this work to hand leads to the competitor who picks up.