Google Business Profile for Tradespeople: Field Guide

A Google Business Profile for tradespeople works differently from one for a shop: you hide your address, set a service area instead, and let the profile itself act as your front page. The fields that actually move you into the map pack are the primary category, the service area you cover, a filled-out services list, real job photos, consistent name and phone details, and a steady trickle of reviews that mention the work you do. Everything else on the profile is presentation. Get those six right and a van with no premises can outrank a firm with an office.

Why the profile now matters more than the website

Search for "electrician near me" and the first thing on screen is the map pack: three businesses, a map, and a row of buttons. Google fills that box from Business Profiles, not from websites. AI answer boxes increasingly do the same thing, because a profile is structured data (category, hours, area, services, ratings) while a website is prose someone has to interpret.

For a one-van firm this flips the priority order. Your website is where people confirm you are real. Your profile is where they find you, decide, and ring you. Many callers never reach the site at all. Google says local ranking rests on three things: relevance (does your profile match the search), distance (how close you are to the searcher or the place they named), and prominence (how well known and well reviewed you are). You cannot move a house. You can absolutely fix relevance and prominence.

Set it up as a service-area business, not an address

If customers do not come to you, you are a service-area business (SAB). During setup, answer "no" to the question about serving customers at your location. Your address is then used for verification but hidden from the public profile.

Two mistakes cost tradespeople rankings here:

• Showing a home address. It publishes your kitchen on Google Maps and pins you to a residential street. Hide it.
• Not registering an address at all. You still enter one for verification. Skipping it slows or blocks the process.

Then set the service area. Google allows up to 20 areas, and its own guidance is not to cover more than roughly two hours' drive from where you are based. Use towns, postcode districts or municipalities rather than a giant blob. In Sweden, list kommuner (Solna, Sundbyberg, Nacka). In the UK, list towns and postcode areas. In New Zealand, list suburbs and districts.

The service area does not mean you rank everywhere in it. It tells Google where you are willing to travel. Distance still applies: you will rank strongest near your verified pin and fade out towards the edge. Setting 20 areas does not buy you 20 areas of visibility, and stuffing them does not help.

The primary category is the single biggest lever

The primary category is the field with the most weight on it, and it is the one people most often get wrong. Pick the category that names what you are, not what you also do.

• Electrician, not "Electrical Installation Service", if the trade is your identity.
• Plumber, not "Bathroom Remodeler", if most jobs are plumbing.
• HVAC Contractor, not "Air Conditioning Repair Service", if you do install and service.

Then add secondary categories for real, sizeable parts of the business: EV charging station contractor, solar energy contractor, security system installer. Add them only if you genuinely do the work regularly. Every secondary category tells Google to show you for those searches, and irrelevant ones bring irrelevant calls.

A useful test: search your main keyword in your town, click the top three profiles, and note their primary category. If all three run one category and you run another, you are competing in a different room.

The business name field: use your real name, nothing more

"Nilsson El" ranks. "Nilsson El — Emergency Electrician Stockholm 24/7" gets edited or suspended. Google's guidelines require the name as used in the real world: on the van, the invoice, the workwear. Keyword stuffing here is one of the most reported and most enforced violations in local search, and competitors do report it. If your registered trading name genuinely contains a keyword ("Stockholm Elservice AB"), that is fine. If you added it last week to game the map, it is not.

Fill in the services list — properly

The services list is underused and it is the cheapest relevance you can buy. Google offers a set of predefined services per category and lets you add custom ones. Add both.

Write 10 to 25 services that match how customers actually phrase the job:

• Fuse box replacement / consumer unit upgrade
• EICR / electrical safety inspection
• EV charger installation
• Outdoor socket installation
• Downlight installation
• Fault finding, no power

Give each one a description of a sentence or two in plain language. These descriptions feed the "justification" lines Google shows under a map-pack result — the little snippet that says "Their services include: EV charger installation". That snippet is often what decides which of three near-identical firms gets the tap.

Booking link, phone, and the buttons that get pressed

The map pack gives you Call, Directions and Website. On the full profile you also get an appointment link if you add one. Set it to a real booking or enquiry page, not your homepage.

• Phone number: a local number outperforms a national 08xx or 0800 number for local intent, and it must match the number on your website exactly. Same format, same digits.
• Website link: add UTM tags (?utm_source=google&utm_medium=gbp) so you can see in analytics how much traffic the profile drives. Without this it lands in "organic" and you will underrate the profile.
• Appointment link: if you run online booking or an intake form, this converts better than a phone call for anyone under 40 and anyone ringing at 9pm.

This is one of the few places a job system earns its keep directly. In OdinTask, the booking and enquiry form is embeddable and produces a link you can drop straight into the appointment field, so the enquiry arrives as a job rather than as a voicemail you transcribe later.

Photos: real jobs, geotagged or not, but real

Forget the geotagging debate. Google strips EXIF from uploads, so tagging coordinates onto your photos does nothing for ranking. What does work is volume, freshness and honesty.

• Upload at least 20 photos to start, then a handful every month. Profiles that go quiet look closed.
• Use real jobs: the finished board, the tidy trunking, the van outside a recognisable local building.
• Include people. A face next to the work outperforms a product shot for calls.
• Add a logo and a cover photo. Minimum 720 x 720 px, JPG or PNG; any modern phone is fine.
• Before-and-after pairs work. Stock photography does not, and customers spot it.

The Q&A section is public and unmoderated — own it

Anyone can ask a question on your profile, and anyone can answer it, including a customer who is wrong or a competitor who is worse. Most tradespeople never look at this tab.

You are allowed to post your own questions and answer them. Do it. Seed six to ten of the things you get asked on the phone all day:

• "Do you charge a call-out fee?"
• "Which areas do you cover?"
• "Can you come out the same day?"
• "Are you insured and certified?"
• "Do you handle the paperwork for the tax deduction?" (In Sweden, ROT: 30% of the labour cost, deducted from the invoice, with an annual ceiling per person shared with RUT — check the current amount at Skatteverket. The UK and NZ have no direct equivalent.)

Answers get upvoted, and the most upvoted answer surfaces on the profile. Answer from the business account so the reply carries the owner badge. Turn on notifications so you see new questions within a day, not a quarter.

What actually influences whether you appear in the map pack

Read that table twice. Most of the advice sold to tradespeople concentrates on the bottom half.

Reviews: the only lever that compounds

Reviews are the one thing on this list that keeps paying. The mechanics that matter:

• Ask at the moment of relief — when the power is back on and the customer is happy, not three weeks later by email.
• Send the short link from your profile ("Ask for reviews" in the Google dashboard). Every extra tap costs you reviews.
• Never incentivise or gate. Offering a discount for a review, or screening for happy customers first, breaks Google's policy and risks the reviews being wiped.
• Reply to every one, including the bad ones, in a sentence or two. Replies are public and read.
• Steady beats spiky. Two a month for a year beats 24 in one week, which looks bought.

Review text carries keywords. A customer who writes "installed our EV charger in Sundbyberg" is doing relevance work no field on the profile can do for you.

A monthly routine that takes 20 minutes

1. Upload 3–5 photos from jobs you actually did that month.
2. Reply to every new review and every new question.
3. Post one update: a job you finished, a seasonal reminder, a change to hours.
4. Check the performance report: calls, direction requests, website clicks, and the search terms people used.
5. Add any new service you sold twice or more to the services list.
6. Check special hours before every public holiday. A profile that says "Open" when you are not earns one-star reviews.

Things that will get you suspended

• Keywords in the business name.
• A virtual office or a mailbox as your address.
• Multiple profiles for one business at different addresses to cover more towns.
• A publicly shown address for a business that has no staffed premises.
• Incentivised or fake reviews, including from staff.

Reinstatement is slow and the profile is dark while you wait. Take the honest route the first time.

The profile is a front door — decide what is behind it

If the profile works, the calls arrive. That is where most one-van firms come unstuck: 15 enquiries a week hitting a voicemail and a notebook. A booking link that lands in a system, a quote that goes out the same evening, and an invoice that follows the job automatically is what turns map-pack visibility into money. Start a free trial of OdinTask and put a real booking link in that field, or read more on the blog.