Your Google Business Profile is the closest thing a local business has to a free storefront on the busiest street in town. Most of them are half filled out.

Here's what's worth doing, roughly in the order of what actually moves something. Everything on this list is something you can go do this week.

Start here: your primary category

If you change one thing, change this.

Your primary category is the single biggest lever you have on which searches you show up for. Not your business name, not your description, not how many photos you've uploaded. The category.

Go look at yours right now. Then go look at what the three businesses in your local map pack are using — you can see their category listed right on their profile. If you're an HVAC company using "Contractor" while the businesses ranking above you use "HVAC Contractor," you've found something worth fixing this afternoon.

Pick the most specific category that genuinely describes your main service. Then add secondary categories for everything else you actually do — but don't stuff them. Categories you don't really serve will bring you calls you can't take.

The rest of the list

Services, with descriptions. Most owners add service names and stop. The description field under each one is real estate that almost nobody uses. Write a sentence or two for each service, in the words a customer would use.

Business description. 750 characters. Lead with what you do and where, not with how long you've been family-owned. Save the story for the second half.

Hours — including holiday hours. Wrong hours are worse than no hours, because someone drives over or calls and gets nothing. Google surfaces special hours prompts around holidays; answer them.

Service area. If you travel to customers, set it properly. Listing thirty cities you'd technically drive to is a mistake — it dilutes your relevance for the towns you actually want.

Photos, added regularly. Not a one-time upload of twelve pictures in 2022. A few real photos of real jobs, added on some kind of rhythm. Exterior, team, work in progress, finished work.

Attributes. Small toggles — women-owned, wheelchair accessible, on-site services, appointment required. Quick to set, and they surface you in filtered searches most owners don't know exist.

Text messaging — if you have it, and if someone will actually watch it. Go look at your own profile before planning around this one. Some profiles offer a text option on the main business number and some don't, and it isn't always obvious why.

If yours does, it's worth having. Plenty of customers would rather text than call, and a lot of them are texting in the evening.

The catch is the same one as voicemail. A text nobody answers is worse than no text option at all, because now you've advertised a channel and ignored someone on it. Before you switch it on, decide who is watching it and how quickly they reply.

The version that works: texts land in the same inbox as your calls and emails so anyone on the team can pick them up, and the sender is saved as a contact — so a question at 7pm on a Saturday becomes a lead you can follow up on Monday instead of something buried in one person's phone.

Booking link. If people can book you online, get that link on the profile.

Updates. Short posts about jobs, seasonal reminders, service notes. They don't need to be clever. They need to exist, which signals the profile is tended.

Review responses. Reply to reviews — all of them, not just the bad ones. It's visible to everyone who reads them afterward.

Consistent name, address, and phone. The same way, everywhere it appears online. Not "Street" here and "St." there.

What's not on the list

The old chat inbox. Google removed Business Profile chat on July 31, 2024, citing low usage. The text option above is a different thing — messages go to your number, not to a Google queue you log into.

Q&A. Gone. Google discontinued the Q&A API on November 3, 2025 and removed the public Q&A section from profiles. If you seeded questions and answers on yours a few years back, they aren't there anymore.

Those questions still matter — do you charge for estimates, do you do emergency calls, what areas do you cover, are you licensed. They just live in your service descriptions and on your website now.

Call history inside the profile. Also removed. Track calls on your own side now.

Keyword-stuffing your business name. "Bob's Plumbing | Best Plumber San Ramon Emergency 24/7" violates policy and is one of the easiest things for a competitor to report. Use your actual business name.

The thing a complete profile can't do

A finished profile makes you eligible. It doesn't make you chosen.

Reviews, proximity to the searcher, and the strength of your website all feed into where you land — which is why the business with the most reviews doesn't automatically win, and why the business with a perfect profile and a website from 2014 still loses. We pulled the real numbers from the San Ramon map pack if you want to see how uneven it actually is.

And once someone taps through to your site, a different set of problems takes over — that's this one.

Do this today

Open your profile and compare your primary category against the businesses ranking above you. That single comparison is the highest-leverage thing on this page, and you can do it right now.

Then work down the rest when you have a real block of time — and be honest with yourself about that. A profile done properly is not a coffee-break job. Categories and services alone take a while once you start reading through the options, and most of this is written in language that appears nowhere else in your business.

That's the actual reason so many profiles sit half-finished. Not laziness. It's unfamiliar, it's fiddly, and it never becomes today's emergency.

None of it is beyond you. The list above is the whole job, in order. Work through it a section at a time and you'll have a profile better than most of your competitors'.

Or hand it over. If the block of time doesn't exist, or you'd rather not guess at categories and service descriptions, this is something we do properly and quickly — book a call and we'll go through what your profile is missing either way.