Most people who find a local business never touch its website first. They see a little card in Google with a name, a star rating and a phone number, and a good few of them ring straight off that card. Worth knowing what goes into it.
The shopfront you did not build
Someone types "sparky Ballarat" or "who fixes hot water on a Sunday" into their phone. What comes back first is a map with three businesses pinned on it, each with a name, a rating and a call button. That block is where the decision usually gets made. The website comes later, if at all.
That card is your Google Business Profile. It costs nothing, it takes an afternoon to set up properly, and plenty of businesses round here still have not claimed theirs. Which is good news if you are reading this, because the bar is low.
What Google is actually weighing
Google publishes this bit, which saves everyone guessing. Local results come down to three things: relevance, distance and prominence. Nearly every tactic you will get spruiked is just one of those three wearing a hat.
Relevance
Does the business match what was typed. This runs mostly off your categories, and the primary category does more work than anything else on the profile. A cafe that also caters, but is filed under "Restaurant", will struggle to turn up for catering searches no matter how good the coffee is. Pick the primary category that matches where the money comes from. Then add the secondary ones.
Distance
How far you are from whoever is searching. You cannot optimise your way out of geography, and anyone telling you otherwise is having you on. Someone searching from Sebastopol gets a different set of results to someone searching from Wendouree, and that is working as intended. What you can do is set an honest service area and stop expecting to win searches two suburbs over.
Prominence
How well known and well regarded the business is. Reviews, mentions on other websites, whether your details are the same everywhere they appear. This is the slow one. It is also where a small operator can genuinely out-work a much bigger competitor, because big competitors are usually shocking at asking for reviews.
The jobs worth doing this week
Fix the primary category
Ten minutes, and it is the single biggest lever on the profile. Have a look at what the businesses beating you are filed under. Google shows the primary category publicly on every profile, so this is not detective work.
Get the details identical everywhere
Name, address, phone. Same wording on your profile, your website footer, your Facebook page and any directory you have ever been listed in. "St" in one place and "Street" in another will not end you, but consistency is one of the few prominence signals you fully control, so you may as well take it.
Ask for reviews properly
Not a QR code sticker on the counter that nobody scans. Ask a happy customer, by name, at the moment they are happy, with the link ready to go. A text with the link in it beats a verbal "leave us a review" about ten to one. Then reply to every single review you get, including the ordinary four-star ones. Replies are visible effort, and Google reads them.
Put real photos up
Your ute, your team, the actual job you finished last week. Not stock images of a handshake. Recent photos keep the profile looking alive, and a punter deciding between you and the next mob will look at them.
Get the hours right, including public holidays
Turning up in a search and then being shut is worse than not turning up. Special hours over Easter and Christmas take two minutes and save you a one-star review from someone who drove across town.
The stuff that will bite you
Stuffing keywords into your business name works right up until it does not. "Ballarat Plumbing and Gas Fitting Emergency 24 Hour" is a suspension waiting to happen, and competitors do report each other. Same goes for a virtual office address you do not actually work from, and for reviews from people who were never customers. Google is not brilliant at catching this quickly, but it does catch it, and getting a profile reinstated is a genuine pain.
The honest version of the game is boring on purpose: right category, real address, real reviews, kept current.
Your website still has a job
The profile gets you seen. The website is where someone checks whether you are worth ringing, and it is also feeding the profile: Google reads your site to work out whether the categories you picked are believable. A profile claiming you do bathroom renovations, pointing at a site that only mentions blocked drains, is sending two different stories.
So the pages matter. Say what you do, say where you do it and put the phone number somewhere a thumb can reach it. That is most of it. More on local SEO for trades →
We are doing this one ourselves
Fair warning that this is not theory from the cheap seats. Our own profile is going through verification right now, which is why the details in our footer got tidied up recently and why the phone number is on every page. Verification is a video call these days for most small businesses, so have your signage, your vehicle and your work area handy when you start it.
If you would rather not spend your Sunday on this, it is part of what we do.
Want your local search sorted without learning all this?
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