Your Google Business Profile has about fifteen fields that matter, and most service businesses fill out four of them. This is the walkthrough for the other eleven. If you are not yet sold on why it deserves an afternoon, start with Stop Ignoring Your Google Business Profile, which makes that case.
Almost all of this is edited in one place. Sign in to the Google account that owns the profile, search your business name, and the management panel appears above the results, with the same buttons you get at business.google.com: Edit profile, Read reviews, Promote, Ask for reviews.
Your Primary Category Decides Which Searches You Can Appear In
Under Edit profile, Business information, Business category, Google gives you one primary category and up to nine additional ones. The primary does most of the work. It is the biggest lever you have over which local searches your profile is eligible for, and it is the field most businesses set too broadly.
Pick the most specific category that describes what actually pays your bills. A company doing mostly residential treatments should be Pest Control Service, not Home Improvement Contractor. An HVAC company earning most of its revenue on installs and service calls should be HVAC Contractor, not General Contractor. Specific beats broad, because Google matches categories to the phrasing people type.
Then add secondary categories for other work you genuinely do: Animal Control Service and Bee Removal Service for a pest company, Drainage Service for a plumber. Add only what you really offer. Filling all nine slots with work you do not do blurs your relevance rather than widening it, and Google suspends profiles over it.
Changing your primary category can move your position in the map results within a week or two, in either direction. Change it once, note the date, and give it a month before judging.
Fill In the Services List, Because Almost Nobody Does
Under Edit profile, Services, Google offers a set of pre-written services tied to your categories, plus the option to add your own. Most profiles leave this blank. Add every service you sell, named the way a customer would say it out loud. Not "Integrated Pest Management Program" but "Ant Control," "Mouse Removal," "Termite Inspection," "Mosquito and Tick Treatment." Each takes a short description, so use it to say what is included.
This does two jobs. Those names sit on your profile where someone comparing three companies will scan them, and the text feeds the answers Google now generates about your business, which is next.
Set a Service Area You Would Actually Drive To
If you go to the customer rather than the other way around, hide your street address and set a service area instead, under Edit profile, Location. Google's guidelines are explicit that a plumber working out of a house or a technician operating from a truck should not display a residential address. A hybrid business, a shop customers visit plus field work, shows the address and adds a service area on top.
You can list up to 20 areas, entered as cities, postal codes, or regions; Google does not let you draw a radius. Google's service area guidance says the outer edge should not sit more than roughly two hours' drive from your base.
Resist the urge to fill all 20 slots. Listing places you would rather not drive to gets you calls you will decline, and it does not help you rank in the towns you care about. List the towns you would happily send a truck to tomorrow.
Your primary category is the biggest lever you have over which "near me" searches your profile can appear in, and it is the field most service businesses get wrong.
get startedPhotos: Real Work, Added Regularly
Photos live under Edit profile, Photos, or behind the Add photo button. Skip stock imagery. What earns attention is proof of work: the crawlspace before and after, the panel wired clean, the finished roof, a technician at a front door with the truck behind him. Get your logo and cover photo in place, add team shots, then keep adding job photos indefinitely. Three practical notes:
- Shoot horizontally. Google crops vertical phone photos awkwardly on desktop.
- Upload a few every month rather than fifty in one afternoon. Recent activity is visible to anyone comparing you against competitors.
- Get faces and vehicles in frame. People are deciding whether to let a stranger into their house.
The system that survives a busy week: one crew member texts three job photos a week to whoever manages the profile.
Posts Keep the Profile From Looking Abandoned
The Promote button, or Add update, publishes a post that shows beneath your listing in Search and Maps. The posts worth writing are seasonal and specific: yard treatments booking now for April before tick season, heat pump tune-ups running two weeks out before the first cold snap, generator installs added to the service list.
One a week is plenty, and a post that took four minutes to write is fine. The point is giving someone comparing three profiles a reason to think you are busy, and giving Google fresh text about what you sell.
The Q&A Section Is Gone, and Your Website Replaced It
Google shut down the public Questions and Answers feature on Business Profiles on November 3, 2025, and retired the associated API. If you seeded your own questions there, that work is gone. What replaced it is an AI answer layer: when someone asks about your business in Maps or Search, Google assembles a response from your profile fields, your reviews, and your website.
So put the questions on your own site instead. Every service page should answer what people actually call and ask: free estimates, how soon you can come out, after-hours emergencies, roughly what a treatment costs, licensing and insurance. That content now does double duty, ranking in organic search and feeding what Google says when nobody clicks through.
Build the Review Ask Into the Job
Companies sitting on 200 reviews did not run a campaign; they built the ask into the job. Get your link first. On the management panel, click Ask for reviews and Google hands you a short URL. Save it in your phone and your scheduling software. Then decide who asks and when. The technician in the driveway, at the moment the customer is visibly happy, gets a far better response rate than an email from the office three days later. A version that works:
- The tech says out loud that a review helps the crew, and mentions a text is coming.
- An automated text with the link goes out within an hour of the job closing.
- The office emails once more to anyone who did not respond, then stops.
Never offer anything in exchange, and never screen customers by asking how happy they are before deciding who gets the link. Both break Google's review policies. Reply to every review, including five-star ones with no text; two sentences is enough, and where it reads naturally, name the service and the town. For the wider payoff, our post on how online reviews feed your local rankings and the rest of your marketing covers what to do with them once they start arriving.
What to Actually Do About a Bad Review
Assume it stays up. Google removes reviews that break its content policies, and you can flag one from the review itself or through the Business Profile support form, but the process is slow and most complaints about price, tone, or a rough day do not qualify.
Your reply is not aimed at the reviewer. It is aimed at the next person reading, who scrolled past your five-star reviews to see how you behave when something goes wrong. That reader wants to know one thing: does this company respond like an adult.
A reply that works does four things in about four sentences. It acknowledges the frustration without sarcasm. It supplies the missing fact, calmly and once, if one is missing. It says what you are willing to do. It moves the rest of the conversation off the platform with a name and a phone number.
Avoid three things. Do not argue the timeline point by point, because a long defensive reply makes the reviewer look reasonable by comparison. Do not mention what they paid or anything else they did not raise first. And do not reply in the hour you read it if it made you angry. One bad review among recent good ones costs you little; one sitting unanswered at the top of your profile for six months costs you calls.
The Ten Minute Monthly Check
Once it is built, upkeep is short. Confirm your hours before every holiday, compare the calls and direction requests on your panel to last month, reread the services list twice a year, and check whether anyone has suggested an edit to your hours or address, since Google sometimes applies those without asking.
Then watch what the profile produces rather than how it looks. Local search was a large part of the work behind the pest control client who grew traffic 48% and leads 206%, and once your profile is solid, Local Services Ads sit above the map results and run off the same verification.
If you would rather hand this off, we manage Google Business Profiles for service companies as part of local SEO. Call (207) 813-4735 or get in touch and we will tell you what your profile is missing.
