Search for a trade and a town on a phone. Before the ordinary results, you get a map and a short list of nearby businesses, each with a rating, a distance and a call button. Those entries are Google Business Profiles, and they are free.
Look at what that placement actually does. It sits above everything a website could rank for, and a customer can tap the number and be talking to you without your site ever loading. For a lot of local searches, the profile is not the thing that leads to the enquiry. It is the enquiry.
Which produces an awkward conclusion for a company that sells websites: if your profile is a mess, fixing it is worth more than anything we could sell you, and it costs nothing.
What to fix, in order
- Claim it. A profile can exist without you having created it. If you have never logged in, there may still be one out there with your name on it and somebody else's opinion of your hours.
- Get the primary category exactly right. This is the single biggest lever and it is one dropdown. "Plumber" and "Drainage service" surface for different searches. Pick the one that matches the work you actually want, not the widest one available.
- Set your service area honestly. Claiming the whole county to catch more searches tends to backfire: you turn up for people too far away to serve, waste calls on both sides, and dilute the area you genuinely cover.
- Make the hours true, including holidays. A customer who drives to a closed business, or rings an "open" number at 7pm and gets nothing, is a bad review waiting to happen.
- Add real photographs. Your van, your team, finished work. Not stock. People are choosing whether to let a stranger into their home and they are looking for evidence you exist.
- Ask for reviews, in person, at the end of a good job. That is the moment somebody will actually do it. Never buy them — they are detectable, and being caught costs more than having none.
Where the website still earns its place
The profile gets you into the list. It does not do the rest. Someone choosing between three plumbers with similar ratings taps through to compare, and what they find decides it: whether you do the specific job they need, whether you cover their street, whether you look like you will turn up. The profile wins the glance. The site wins the choice.
They also feed each other. A consistent name, address and phone number across both is one of the plainer signals you can send about being a real business at a real address, and it costs nothing but attention.
Do the free thing first. If your profile is neglected, no website will make up for it — and if it is in good shape, you will find out what your website is really contributing.
