People still call it Google My Business. Google renamed it Google Business Profile. Same thing: the free listing that can put your company on the map, in the three-pack, and in the panel that shows when someone searches your name. It is not an ad. You do not pay to exist there.
A lot of local businesses skip it and then buy ads because “Google isn’t showing us.” Often Google is showing the businesses that filled this out. The ads are the labeled results on top. The map is the free one. If the free one is blank, you are paying to cover for a form you didn’t finish.
What actually shows up
Search “roofer near me” or “dentist in Denver” on a phone. Before the usual list of websites, Google shows a map and a few businesses. That block is built from Business Profiles, not from whoever has the nicest homepage. Name, category, distance, hours, reviews, and whether the listing looks alive all sit in that decision. Your site still matters. It is not the first thing on the screen.
Search your own business name and you should see the panel on the right, or the card on a phone: hours, phone, address or service area, photos, the link to the site. If that panel is a guess Google made from an old directory, you don’t control it. Claiming the profile is how you take it back.
Why this beats starting with ads
An ad runs while you pay. The day the card stops, the listing stops. A Business Profile stays up. Someone who already wants a plumber in their neighborhood can call from the map without you bidding on the word “plumber” against every company in the metro.
Ads are useful when you want more calls this week and the free listing is already solid. They are a bad substitute for the listing. You can spend a few hundred dollars and still send people to a profile with no hours, three photos from 2019, and a website that doesn’t match the name on the map. Google is not hiding you. The profile is unfinished.
What to fill in, in order
- The real name. The name on the truck and the invoices. Not “Best Denver Roofer — Cheap — 24/7” stuffed with search terms. Google penalizes names that are advertisements.
- One primary category that matches the job. Painter, not “contractor,” if painting is what you want to be found for. Extra categories are fine. The first one is the one that counts.
- Address or service area, honestly. A shop with a door uses the address. A company that drives to the customer hides the address and lists the cities it actually covers. Don’t drop a pin on a house you don’t work from.
- Hours, including the ones that change. A holiday hour that’s wrong is how you get the one-star review that wasn’t about the work.
- The phone you answer, and the website. The number on the profile, the site, and the truck should be the same number.
- Photos of the real place and the real jobs. The storefront, the truck, a finished room, the team if they’re willing. Not a stock handshake. Profiles with current photos get opened. Empty ones get skipped.
Reviews are the part you can’t fake in a weekend
The map is a comparison. Two roofers, similar distance, and one has forty reviews that mention hail and insurance. The other has the sentence “Great company!” from a cousin. People tap the first one. You don’t buy that. You ask after the job, when the customer is still happy, and you make it easy: a short link, a text, not a speech.
Reply to them. The good ones and the bad ones. A reply is public proof that a person is on the other end. Don’t offer a discount for a five-star review. Google’s rules are clear, and customers can smell it.
The listing and the website have to agree
The profile links to a site. If that site is a Facebook page, a half-built builder template, or a homepage that never says what you do, the click dies. The name, the city, the services, and the phone on the site should match the profile. Google reads both. A person reads both. Mismatches look like two different companies.
This is the page we build for $500: what you do, where you do it, and a way to call or text, finished within a week. Hosting is $240 a year and includes free updates, so the hours and the photos don’t freeze the month you launch. The profile can point at a page that is actually about the work. We wrote the rest of the traffic side — search, and the social networks — on the traffic page.
A simple week, if the profile is new
- Claim it at Google Business Profile. Use an email the business will still have in two years.
- Set the name, the primary category, the phone, and the hours.
- Add the service area or the address. Verify however Google asks. Sometimes that’s a postcard. Wait for it.
- Put up ten photos from real jobs. Not a logo on a white square and nothing else.
- Add the services in plain language. “Water heater replacement,” not “solutions.”
- Point the website field at the real site. If you don’t have one yet, that’s the gap.
- Ask the last five happy customers for a review. Then keep asking, one job at a time.
Posts on the profile — a job you finished, a storm special, a change in hours — tell Google the listing isn’t abandoned. They are not a blog. A sentence and a photo, once a week, is enough.
When ads still make sense
After the profile is complete, the site matches it, and you want more calls than the map is sending. Buy the ads then. You will know what a lead is worth, because some of them already came in free. Until then, an ad budget is a way to rent attention you could have had by finishing a form.
Look at the businesses we build for. The ones that get found are not the ones with the biggest ad account. They’re the ones a person can understand in a minute, on the map and on the site. If the profile is the part that’s empty, fix that this week. If the site is the part that doesn’t match, send us the one you have.