See a Sample Report (PDF)For a Long Island contractor, the Google Business Profile does more work than almost anything else you own, and on most profiles we audit it is somewhere between half configured and abandoned.
The reason is mechanical. Local searches put the map pack above everything else, and on a phone the map pack occupies most of the visible result. For a good share of the searches that matter to a contractor, it is the entire visible result. If you are not in it, for practical purposes you are not there.
The Fields That Actually Do Something
Not all of the profile matters equally. Ranked by what moves the outcome:
One: the primary category. This carries more weight than any other single field and it is the most commonly wrong. It should be the precise thing you do, not the broadest thing you could claim. A siding contractor whose primary category is "Contractor" is competing in a category that describes a hundred businesses instead of the one that describes them.
Two: the service area. Set it as the towns you actually serve, not a radius, and not the whole Island. This is the same discipline as ad targeting and it should use the same list, because maintaining two different definitions of where you work guarantees they will disagree. We covered building that list here.
Three: services, itemized. Each service listed separately with its own description. This is tedious and it is one of the few places where filling in the tedious thing measurably changes what you show up for.
Four: reviews, and specifically the responses. Volume and recency both matter, and so does whether you reply. A profile with forty reviews and no replies reads as abandoned to a person, whatever it does algorithmically.
Five: photos, dated. Job site photos, uploaded regularly, geotagged by virtue of being taken there. A profile whose newest photo is three years old is telling a customer something.
The Three That Only Matter in Winter
Seasonal, easy to forget, and all three are commonly missed when the season arrives.
Holiday hours, set in advance for every closure. Not just the big ones. If you close between Christmas and New Year, say so. A customer who calls a number listed as open and gets no answer does not conclude that you are closed, they conclude you do not answer the phone, and some of them leave that in a review. This is a five minute job with an outsized downside, and it is the single most common thing we find wrong on a profile in December.
Whether you are taking emergency calls. If you are, say it in the description and in a post. Winter emergency searches are the highest intent traffic in the category and they route heavily through the map.
Seasonal services turned on or off. If half your service list is dormant until April, the profile should reflect what you can actually do that month.
What to Ignore
Some of the advice around this product has drifted well past what it can support.
Do not keyword stuff the business name. "ABC Roofing Long Island Best Roofer Nassau" violates the guidelines, is reportable by any competitor, and risks a suspension that takes weeks to unwind. The gain is small and the downside is losing the profile in your busiest month.
Do not buy reviews. Aside from being against the rules and, for what it is worth, illegal under FTC guidance, the pattern is detectable and the cleanup is worse than the original problem.
Do not obsess over posting frequency. Posts are worth doing because they improve what a person sees. Weekly posting to satisfy a schedule produces filler that nobody reads and does not buy a ranking.
Do not chase the Q and A section with fake questions. You can seed genuine questions customers actually ask. Inventing a question to hide a keyword in the answer reads exactly as what it is.
The Audit
Half an hour, once, and again before each season. Open your own profile on a phone, logged out, and go through it as a customer would.
- Is the primary category the precise thing you do
- Does the service area match the towns you actually serve
- Are services itemized, or is it one line
- Is the newest photo from this year
- Are holiday and seasonal hours set for every closure you already know about
- Has every review from the last six months been answered
- Does the phone number ring a line somebody actually answers
Most contractors here find three or four of those wrong. All of them are free to fix and none require a developer.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Do Google Business Profile posts affect rankings?
- There is no good evidence they do directly. They affect what somebody sees once they have found you, which is worth doing for its own sake. Post because it improves the profile a real person reads, not because you expect a ranking move.
- Should a contractor hide their address?
- If you do not serve customers at your location, yes. Set it as a service area business. A contractor showing a home address gets the address shown publicly and gains nothing, and the service area is what actually describes the business.
- How many categories should I select?
- One primary that is exactly what you do, and only the secondary categories that are genuinely true. The primary category carries the most weight, and diluting it with loosely related secondaries is a common and self-inflicted problem.