If you can only do one this month, do the Google Business Profile. It is free, and for a local trade business it will bring you more work per hour spent than anything else on the list.
I sell websites, and I am still telling you to do the free thing first.
What each one is for
The Google Business Profile is the panel that appears on the right of a search result and the pin that appears on Maps. Address or service area, hours, phone number, photos, reviews, the services you offer. It feeds the “map pack”, the little block of three local businesses that sits above the ordinary results for almost every trade-plus-suburb search.
Your website is where you explain yourself. What you take on and what you do not, what your finished work looks like, what it costs, why you are worth ringing rather than the next listing down.
They do not compete: one gets you seen and the other closes the job. But they do not cost the same, and one of them is free.
Why the profile comes first
For a local search, the map pack sits above the organic results. A well-filled profile with a decent set of reviews can put you in front of people who never scroll far enough to see a single website, yours included.
It also answers the boring questions that otherwise become phone calls: are you open, where are you, do you cover my suburb, what is the number. Every one of those answered on the listing is a call somebody did not have to make, and for a business where the phone is already busy, that is worth more than it sounds.
The bit almost everyone half-does
Claiming the profile takes ten minutes. Filling it in properly does not, and this is where most trade businesses stop:
- Categories. Pick the primary one carefully; it does more work than anything else on the profile. “Deck builder” and “carpenter” are not the same query.
- Service area, not just an address. If you go to customers, set it as a service area business and list the suburbs you cover.
- Real photos. Your own finished jobs, not stock. Add to them as you go.
- Services. List them individually. Each one is another thing you can match against.
- Hours, kept true. Including the ones where you are not available.
- Reviews, actively asked for. Google reviews specifically. Facebook reviews do not feed the map pack, and I have watched clients build up a pile of lovely Facebook comments that do nothing for their local ranking.
Where the website earns its keep
It answers what a listing cannot. A profile has no room to show ten finished jobs, quote the National Construction Code height and gap rules for a balustrade, list the postcodes you cover, or say plainly which jobs you would rather not take. Those are the things that make a careful customer choose you over the listing above you.
It backs the profile up. Google cross-checks. A listing pointing at a site with matching address, hours, phone number and service area is a more trustworthy listing than one pointing at nothing, or at a site that contradicts it. When I helped a clinic get their profile up alongside a new site, both carried identical details for exactly this reason, so they would not drift apart a year later.
So, the order
- Claim and completely fill in the Google Business Profile.
- Get a review process going. Ask every happy customer, with a direct link, the same week you finish the job.
- Build the site, and make it agree with the profile in every detail.
- Keep both current.
Steps one and two cost you time and nothing else. If you get to step three, that is when the pricing conversation starts.
What I do about it
Google Business Profile setup is part of the job, not an upsell. The domain, email, the listing and the site all get pointed at the same details. That is the whole approach, and I work that way because handing someone a website and leaving them to work out the rest is how businesses end up with a beautiful site nobody can find.
If your profile is already sorted and you want the other half, get in touch. If it is not, do that first, and come back to me afterwards.