In This Article:
Summary:
In a previous article we talked about how to create a Google Business Profile. If you need some help with making one, then check that out and come back. Now we will go through every section in your Google Business Profile one by one to optimise it to perform as good as possible and to drive you up the local google search results for your trade. This article is focused on local, service based tradesmen and helping you to build up your online presence.
Edit Profile:
This section has all the basic information that you would have filled out when creating your Google Business Account. I’ll go through some of the key areas that could be holding you back from appearing in more searches.
Business Name: Your Trading Name
Business Category: Choose whatever is relevant to your business, if you are a plumber choose plumber, a carpenter – choose carpenter
Description: Your chance to talk about your business and what will show up for people. Take some time to write something valuable to your potential customers. Include the services you provide, what makes you unique, the areas that you serve and a call to action.
An example that I used for a concreter:
Specialists in decorative concrete including exposed aggregate concrete, coloured concrete, plain concrete and more. With almost a decade of landscape construction experience, we provide expert services in driveway construction, house surrounds concreting, slabs and vehicle crossings. We're passionate about transforming properties across Melbourne with our concreting solutions and look forward to helping you with your next job. Contact us today for a free concreting quote or with any concreting questions.
Contact Information: Make sure to include everything that you can here, add all your socials, your website and your contact number. Having all of this here is a massive boost in trust to potential customers who can visit these places before contacting you and see that you are active.
Locations & Areas: This is important for local businesses. I have seen many that have gone way to large including all of Victoria/Melbourne or not listing any areas at all. My advice is to be the big fish in the small pond and Google recommends this as well stating that your service area should include no further than a 4 hour drive from your address.
Business Location: If you have an office or factory that customers can attend, include that as your business location. If you are a smaller business that has a home office, then don’t include your address here for the sake of your safety and professional image. I have found that if a residential location shows up as your address it can appear strange to some customers.
Service Areas: My advice is to go small and detailed rather than trying to cast a wide net, especially for smaller businesses. Competition is fierce and it is far better to be the big fish in the small pond rather than the small fish in the ocean. You can pick up to 20 service areas, I advise that you pick the 20 closest suburbs surrounding where you want to serve (typically around your home if you’re a tradesmen). With other clients this has led to higher quality leads that are much closer to their home address, decreasing travel time and increasing profit.
Opening Hours: This is neither here nor there in my experience, put times in when you are comfortable for people to call you or visit your business location.
There is nothing else that I think is valuable in this section, let me know if you think otherwise as I would love to update it for all of my clients.
Reviews:
I think this is one of the biggest factors in ranking high on local searches. While it isn’t the only factor, I have had clients that have had a noticeable improvement after we started some reputation management and actively got reviews on the Google Business Page.
It also makes you stand out in the search, personally when I am looking for a tradie, I will nearly always pick the one with 100 5-star reviews over the one with 5 reviews in total. It adds so much credibility and trust. It is really easy to get reviews with the Google Business Page, you just pass on the link to your customer and they can send it.
Check out our article about how to get more reviews for some strategies to get reviews from past clients and make it easier to get reviews from future ones.
Messages:
Now that you have logged in Google Business will guide you through the process of making an account. You will need to provide your business name, address and category. Make sure everything is spelled correctly and looks good, this is going to be what your potential customers see when they find you!
Photos:
Make sure that you upload your logo to make your profile memorable and add an appropriate cover image, this is what shows up on your profile when people visit, next to the map of your service area. My advice for tradesmen is to make the cover image an image of you or your team working on a job. It is professional, shows your workmanship, a friendly face and is a massive trust builder compared to just your logo or a picture of your finished work which I find most people just glaze over. We remember faces not nice roof gutters.
You can upload a bunch of images here; it will be added to your page’s photos. I typically won’t post a lot of images, maybe a handful of recent work or images of the business. I would much prefer to upload them as ‘updates’ so that they have some context for potential customers looking at them rather than just random images.
Performance:
These stats are only from your Google Business, not from people that find you from social media, click on your website or any other means. It is awesome to see how you’re performing on here after you’ve made some updates. You can track how many calls and website clicks have occurred from your page. Hopefully you or your developer have set-up some sort of other analytics that tracks all site visitors.
Services:
This is where you put all the services that you offer, and it is important as these keywords are what potential customers are searching for and if you don’t include them, you won’t show up or be highlighted as offering the service. There is a limited amount of default services but you can enter custom ones. Make sure you include everything that you do and variations of that without going overboard.
For a roof plumber I put:
Roof installation, roof repair, gutter cleaning, gutter installation, gutter repairs, roof damage repair, roof repair for storm and wind damage, skylight repair, roof plumbing, roof plumber, roof leak repair, metal roof repair, downpipes, roof gutters
Updates:
I find these are great for helping you to stand out as hardly anyone posts them. For tradies it is an awesome place to showcase some of your past work, talk about your team and your business’s story or maybe add your pricing or services. It is kind of like Instagram and you can post a group of images and some text. I do not know the effect it has on SEO but it looks great when you have at least a few recent posts there to let people know that you’re active. I always make a couple when I first optimise my client’s Google Business Page and recommend that you post one every month or so to keep it up to date.
Final Words:
That is all I know about Google business and what I do for every customer I create a website for. I hope it is helpful, especially for a local tradie trying to get everything done themselves. If you have any questions don’t be afraid to contact us or join our Facebook Group where I write guides like this and answer questions for local tradesmen that are running into trouble with getting online. This is a really simple way that I think you can get a few extra leads per month and leads that are in your defined service area.
Need Some More Help?
Creating a Google Business Page is included in our website development package, learn more about our Web Development Services here and contact us if you would like some help building a website for your business.
