Fix your Google Business Profile in five minutes

This is free, it takes five minutes, and for a lot of trades it does more than a new website would. Do it before you spend a dollar with anyone, including us.

Search your trade and your suburb on a phone. Before any website, Google shows a map with three businesses in it. That box is where local work comes from, and getting into it is decided mostly by settings you control.

The five minutes

1. Primary category. Search `google.com/business`, open your profile, and check it says exactly what you do — "Locksmith", not "Security service". This single field does more than everything else on the list.
2. Service areas. Add every suburb you actually work in. Not a 50 km radius — the named suburbs. Ten is fine.
3. Hours, honestly. If you take after-hours calls, say so. If you do not, do not say you do: a missed call at 9pm on a profile that claims 24 hours earns a one-star review.
4. Services list. Add every job type separately. Each one is a phrase somebody searches.
5. Photos with real names. Five photos of actual jobs, saved as something meaningful before you upload — a van shot named after your trade and suburb beats `IMG_2049.jpg`.

If you only do one of these, do the primary category. A wrong category is the most common reason a good business is invisible in its own suburb.

What it will not fix

A profile alone does not close anyone. When somebody taps through, they land on whatever you have got, and if that is nothing — or a page from 2014 — you have paid for the lead with your time and lost it at the door. That is the part we build.

After the five minutes

Reviews are what keep the profile moving, and there is a way to ask for them that does not make you feel like a nuisance: getting reviews without being a pest.