Google Business Profile for UK Trades: What Google Actually Says Gets You Found

Google publishes this, so there is no need to guess. Its own help page says local results are "mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity". Relevance is how well your profile matches what somebody typed. Distance is how far you are from the person searching. Prominence is how well known your business is.

Two of those three you control from a free profile. The third, distance, is decided by where you are based. That is why a sparky round the corner usually beats one ten miles out, and why the profile is worth twenty minutes of an evening.

Google also says businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results. Most trade profiles are half filled in. That is the gap, and it costs nothing to close.

Google's guidelines are blunt about this. Your name "should reflect your business's real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers". Adding keywords, a town or a service to the name is against the rules.

So "Hayes Electrical" is fine. "Hayes Electrical Emergency Electrician Bristol 24hr" is not. It looks clever for about a month. Google says it reserves the right to suspend profiles that break the guidelines, and a suspended profile is far worse than a plain one, because it vanishes completely while you appeal.

Somebody local will report it as well. Competitors do watch.

Categories are the same trap. Google's wording is "use as few categories as possible to describe your overall core business from the provided list", and the test it gives is that a category should finish the sentence "this business IS a", not "this business HAS a". Electrician. Perhaps one more if a genuinely separate part of the work needs it. Not eight categories covering every job you have ever done, picked because they look like search terms.

If you work out of a house or a unit and travel to jobs, you are what Google calls a service-area business. The instruction is plain: "If you don't serve customers at your business address, remove your address from your Business Profile".

Two limits worth knowing. You can have up to 20 service areas, set by town or postcode rather than a pin on a map. And Google says the boundaries of your overall area "shouldn't be more than about 2 hours of driving time from where your business is based".

The temptation is to list every town within an hour of the van. Resist it. Distance is measured from where you actually are, not from the list you typed in, so a long list does not make you appear in a town forty miles away. It only makes the profile vaguer about the places you really want.

Put your real hours in. Google asks for your regular customer-facing hours of operation, and a profile that says you are open when you are not is a bad first impression waiting to happen.

Then think about the hours you have just told everybody you are shut. Somebody with no hot water at half seven on a Tuesday is not waiting until nine tomorrow. Based on the 411 Locals study of calls to small firms, only around 38% get answered live, and 85% of the people who do not get through never ring back. Your profile can be perfect and you can still lose the job in the ten seconds the phone rings out.

Posts do go somewhere real. Google says they can appear in the "Updates" or "Overview" tabs of the profile on mobile, and in the "From the owner" section on a computer.

Five things worth posting, none of them more than two minutes standing at the van:

A finished job, photographed before you pack the tools away. An answer to "do you cover Chatham", written once and left up. A five star review, screenshotted. A common question answered properly, like what a fuse board upgrade actually involves on the day. Your availability this week.

On prominence, Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking. That is about as direct as Google ever gets.

Nothing honest automates that. You ask in person, standing in the kitchen you have just finished, and you text them the link yourself before you drive off. That one ask beats every clever trick on this page.

A well set up profile does one job. It makes the phone ring. What happens in the next thirty seconds is where most trades lose the work.

That is the part we build at Nero Engine: reviews at the top of the page, every call and message answered day or night, the job details taken and sent straight to your phone while the customer is still keen. £299 a month, one extra job a month covers it.