What should a Google Business Profile include for a home service business?
A complete Google Business Profile has your correct name, phone, service area, services, hours, photos, and recent reviews, and it should be kept current. For a home service business the profile is often the first thing a homeowner sees, sitting on the map before any website. A profile with gaps or an old phone number sends that homeowner to the next company on the list.
Why does a Google Business Profile matter so much to a home service business?
When a homeowner searches for a plumber or an air conditioning repair company near them, Google often shows a map with a handful of local businesses before it shows any websites. Plenty of homeowners call straight from that map and never open a website at all. For a lot of your calls, the profile is the whole first impression.
Say a homeowner finds water under the kitchen sink at seven in the morning. She searches on her phone, looks at the three plumbing companies on the map, and taps the one that shows it is open, lists the kind of repair she needs, and has reviews from the past few weeks. The company with the missing hours and the reviews from years ago may do better work, but she has no way of knowing that from what she can see.
What information belongs on the profile?
Start with the facts a customer needs to reach you. Your business name should read exactly the way it appears on your trucks, your invoices, and your website. The phone number should be one that gets answered during the hours you list, and the hours should say whether you take emergency calls. If you work at customers' homes, the service area should name the towns and neighborhoods you actually drive to.
Then describe the work. List your services one at a time instead of a single word for your trade. An HVAC company that lists air conditioning repair, furnace replacement, and maintenance plans separately tells a homeowner far more than one that just says "HVAC." A short description in plain words and a link to your website round out the basics.
Photos and reviews are what make the profile feel real. Photos of your own crew, your own trucks, and jobs you finished in the area show a homeowner who is coming to the door. Recent reviews from real customers tell them how it went for people like them.
What goes wrong when a profile is set up once and left alone?
Most profiles are complete on the day someone sets them up and drift out of date after that. The business changes its phone line and the old number stays on the map. Holiday hours never get posted, so a customer drives to a closed office or calls into a voicemail box nobody checks. The newest photo is from the year the company started, and the services list still shows the work you did then instead of the work you want now.
Another common problem is that nobody at the company knows who controls the profile. A former employee or an old agency set it up under their own email, and the owner cannot change a single line without tracking that person down. Your profile belongs to your business, so the login should be in your name.
How do reviews fit into a Google Business Profile?
Reviews are the part of the profile that goes stale fastest, because the only way to keep them current is to keep getting new ones. A profile whose last review is two years old tells a homeowner that either the business has slowed down or nobody there is paying attention.
New reviews come from asking every happy customer, right after a good job, in a way that takes them a moment. That habit is covered in how to get more Google reviews without being pushy. Replying to the reviews you get, the good ones and the hard ones, also shows the next homeowner that a real person reads them.
What a fix looks like
A homeowner who searches for furnace repair on a cold Saturday finds your company on the map showing open, with furnace repair listed by name and a review from a customer in her town written a few days earlier. She taps the number and it rings in your office, where someone answers during the hours the profile shows. When you add a service or close for Thanksgiving, the change is on the map that same day, because the login is yours and someone at the company is responsible for it. Each month the profile picks up photos from jobs you finished nearby and reviews from customers who were asked right after the work.
Home Service Guild completes your Google Business Profile and keeps it current in your name, and the Home Service Guild Marketing Operations System puts calls from the profile into the same list as every other inquiry and sends a review request after each job.
Questions owners also ask
Can a home service business without a storefront have a Google Business Profile?
Yes. Google lets a business that works at customers' homes hide its street address and show the area it serves instead. A plumber or a cleaning company that runs from a home office can set its profile up this way and still show up for the towns it serves.
How often should I update my Google Business Profile?
Update it any time something about the business changes, such as a phone number, your hours, or a service you have added. Adding photos as you finish jobs worth showing keeps it looking alive between those changes.
What should I do if someone else controls my Google Business Profile?
Get it back into your own name. Ask the person or agency who set it up to add you as the owner, and if you cannot reach them, Google has a way to request access to a profile for your business. Until you control it, you cannot fix anything on it.
Does a Google Business Profile replace a website?
No. The profile catches the homeowner who is ready to call right now, and the website answers the homeowner who is still comparing companies and wants to know more. The two should say the same things, and a website that gets calls is worth building alongside the profile.
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