Understanding your Google Business Profile
The free Google listing that drives most of your local enquiries. We optimise and manage it for you.
Your Google Business Profile is the listing that shows up on the right of a Google search and on Google Maps when someone looks for your business or your trade nearby. It shows your name, your reviews, your photos, your services and how to contact you. For a local trade it is the single biggest driver of enquiries, often bigger than the website itself.
Why it matters so much
When someone searches “[your trade] near me”, Google leans heavily on Business Profiles to decide who to show in the map results at the top of the page. A strong, complete, well reviewed profile is what gets you into that map pack. That is where a lot of your phone calls and quote requests come from.
What we do with it
We set your profile up properly and keep it that way. That includes:
- Choosing the right primary category for your trade, for example “Roofing contractor” for a roofer.
- Listing your services and your service area accurately.
- Writing a clear, policy compliant business description.
- Setting your opening hours.
- Keeping it optimised over time as Google changes things, so your local ranking stays protected.
We manage your profile as a Manager, which means we can make these improvements on your behalf. The profile itself stays yours.
What you do
Most of it is handled for you, but there are a couple of things only you can do as the verified business owner:
- Posts and Q&A. If we draft a Google post or a question and answer for your profile, you publish it yourself from your end. This is a Google rule, not a quirk on our side, and it keeps your profile safe.
- Photos. Your profile photos must be your own real photos of your work, premises, team or vans. Send them to us and we add them, or you can add them yourself.
What runs in the background
Your optimised profile keeps working as your local visibility engine without you touching it, and your growing Google reviews keep feeding your ranking. The reviews appear both on your profile and on your SmartSite.
If you want to understand how the profile and your website work together to get you found, the local SEO guide below explains it in plain English.