Start with the primary category. It is the one setting that decides which searches your profile is even eligible to appear in, and it is the field contractors get wrong most often — usually by choosing something broad like "Contractor" when the work is in "Roofing contractor", "HVAC contractor" or "Plumber".
Everything else below matters, but nothing else on the profile rescues a wrong category. What follows is the checklist we work through on a trades profile, in the order we do it, including the parts where the honest answer is "it depends" and where doing it yourself is the right call.
The audit you can run before paying anybody
Sign in to the Google account that owns the listing and search your business name. The standalone Business Profile app was retired, so management now happens inside Search and Maps. Work down this list:
- Primary category — one only, and it should name the trade, not the sector.
- Additional categories — up to nine more, ten in total.
- Business name — exactly what is on the van, the invoices and the sign. No city, no keywords.
- Service area or address — one or the other, and the choice has consequences.
- Photos — count them, and check the date on the newest one.
- Services and Products — most trades profiles have neither filled in.
If more than three are wrong, the profile is the cheapest thing on your list to fix, and it should be fixed before you spend on ads. Our free SEO audit tool flags the profile-level issues; the rest needs eyes on the listing.
Categories: primary is a promise, secondary is a hint
Google treats your primary category as the definition of the business. Secondary categories broaden what you can appear for, but they carry far less weight, and stacking ten of them does not make you ten businesses.
You cannot invent categories — you pick from Google's list, and it is more specific than people expect. "Air conditioning contractor", "HVAC contractor" and "Furnace repair service" are separate entries, and they are not interchangeable in the results.
Mistakes by trade:
- Roofers setting "Construction company" as primary. "Roofing contractor" is the one that appears for roof repair searches.
- HVAC firms that mostly install setting a repair category primary, then wondering why the calls are all $180 service jobs rather than system replacements.
- Plumbers using "Plumber" primary but never adding "Drainage service" or "Water heater installation" as secondaries, so the specific searches go elsewhere.
- Electricians adding "Solar energy contractor" when they do not do solar. That pulls in enquiries you cannot serve, and a run of "sorry, we don't do that" calls is worse than no calls.
Service area versus address: the decision that trips up trades
If customers do not come to your premises, hide the address. A service-area business with a hidden address is the right setup for most contractors and it is what Google asks for. A public address at a house or a yard nobody visits exposes you to a suspension.
The trade-off is real. Hidden-address listings are still ranked from the location you set, so a shop in the north of a metro will not sit in the map pack for the southern suburbs however many service areas you add. Service areas say where you will travel. They do not move your pin.
- You can add up to 20 service areas. Use cities, counties or ZIP codes, not a 200-mile radius drawn around everything.
- Google's own advice is that service areas should not stretch beyond roughly two hours' drive from your base. Listing a whole state reads as spam and helps nothing.
- If you genuinely have crews and premises in two metros, that is two listings with two real addresses and two phone numbers. A second location you cannot staff or verify is a suspension waiting to happen.
This is where local SEO stops being a checklist and becomes geography. If your pin sits badly relative to the suburbs you want, no on-profile edit changes that. The answer is a real second location or paid coverage for the gap.
Photos, and how often to add them
Photos are the part contractors are best placed to win and most likely to neglect. Crews already photograph jobs for insurance and change orders, and CompanyCam, Jobber and Housecall Pro store them with dates attached.
- Logo and cover. Logo square, cover 16:9. Google still picks what shows first, but these are what it draws on.
- Team and vehicles. Branded truck, crew in uniform. This is what people check before letting somebody in the house.
- Job photos, before and after. Shot on a phone is fine. At least 720 x 720, under 5MB, JPG or PNG.
- Cadence. Two to four new photos a month from the field beats forty stock images uploaded once. Recency is visible to customers whatever its ranking effect.
Do not upload marketing renders, stock photography of somebody else's kitchen, or images with your phone number burned into them. Google strips overlaid contact details, and a wall of stock shots reads as a shell company to anyone comparing three quotes.
Services, products, Q&A and posts
Services
Add every suggested service item you actually perform, then add custom ones for the rest. Each takes a description of up to 300 characters. Write them the way a customer describes the problem — "no hot water", "roof leak after storm" — not the way your invoicing software names it.
Products
Products render as a carousel with a photo, a name and an optional price, which makes them useful for trades even though the field was built for retail. Tune-ups, inspections, service plans, diagnostic call-outs. Prefer not to publish prices? List the item with a description and no price.
Questions and answers
Anyone can answer a question on your profile, including competitors and people who guessed. You are allowed to post questions and answer them yourself, and you should. Seed the six or eight you answer on the phone every week: call-out charges, licensing and insurance, weekend work, areas covered, financing. Questions are ordered by upvotes, so vote up the ones that matter, then check monthly for new ones.
Posts
Posts are not a ranking lever in any way we can demonstrate, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling posting. They are a conversion lever: a recent post with a real job photo makes the listing look like a going concern. Offer posts carry start and end dates, so they are the ones worth scheduling around seasonal work.
The fields nearly every contractor leaves blank
- Business description — 750 characters, of which roughly the first 250 show before truncation. Say what you do, where, and what makes you different. Not "we pride ourselves on quality service".
- Opening date — free credibility if you have traded since 1994.
- Attributes — veteran-owned, on-site services, languages spoken, appointment required. These feed filters and the knowledge panel.
- Special hours — the holidays. A listing showing "hours might differ" while a competitor shows "open" loses the call.
- UTM tags on the website link — without them GA4 files most profile traffic as organic or direct and you cannot tell what the listing produced. Tag the website button, the booking link and the menu link separately.
- A dedicated landing page — sending profile traffic to a homepage wastes it. Point it at a page for that trade and that city, built to take the enquiry. That is web design and development work, but it is where the money leaks.
One more: the reply field on reviews. Replies are public, indexed and read by people choosing between you and two others. Reply to all of them, in your own words. If review volume is the real problem, that is a process fix — a request sent at invoice time from the field — and reputation management is about building that habit.
What this should cost
The profile is free. What you pay for is time and judgement. Bands we see in the US market:
| Scope | Typical range | What moves it |
|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself, one clean-up pass | $0 plus a Saturday | Whether you have photos already and can write |
| One-off professional optimisation | $300 – $900 | Number of listings, whether suspension recovery is needed |
| Ongoing local SEO, single location | $500 – $2,000 per month | Whether pages, citations and review process are included |
| Multi-location or multi-branch trades | $1,500 – $5,000+ per month | Location count, reporting depth, content volume |
Star Force Solutions starts from $200, always a minimum rather than a fixed price, and it moves with location count and how much work sits outside the profile. Our pricing page sets out what sits in each tier.
Run this arithmetic before buying anything. Take your average job value, multiply by the share of enquiries you close, and you have what one call is worth. A $900 job closed one time in three makes a call worth $300. Compare that with the retainer and work out how many extra calls it has to produce to be worth having. Do the same sum for paid search, where the cost per click is on the invoice.
When to do it yourself
One location, one trade, and a free Saturday: do this yourself. The checklist above is the whole job, and the person who took the photos will write better descriptions than anyone we could put on it. Bring in help when you have several locations, a suspension you cannot clear, or a website that is not converting what the listing already sends.
If you want somebody to look at what you have and say plainly which parts are actually broken, book a call. We work with contractors and construction firms across the US from El Paso, and the first conversation is usually about the three fields nobody filled in.
