There is one free thing that outperforms every paid thing available to a local business, and most people spend twenty minutes on it once and never open it again.
Your Google Business Profile decides whether you appear in the map results. On a phone, the map is most of the first screen. Three businesses get listed. Being one of them is worth more than almost anything else you could do this month.
Here's every field that matters.
Before you start
Search your business name on Google. One of three things is true:
A profile exists and you control it. Good, skip ahead.
A profile exists and you don't control it. Google creates these automatically. Click "Own this business" and go through verification.
Nothing exists. Create one. Verification is usually a postcard, a phone call, or a video these days.
Verification is non-negotiable. An unverified profile ranks nowhere.
The fields, in order of impact
Primary category
This one field does more than the rest combined, and it's the one people get wrong most.
Pick the category that matches what customers search, not what's on your business license. "Plumber" not "Contractor." "Electrician" not "Home Services." If you're a roofer who also does gutters, primary is Roofing Contractor and Gutter Service goes in additional categories.
Look at whoever's ranking above you and check what they're using. It's public.
Services
List every single one, individually, with a description on each.
This is a large text field most businesses leave near-empty. Every service you list is another phrase you can appear for. If you do fourteen things, list fourteen things.
Want this done for you along with everything else? Tell us about your business — about a minute, and you can talk instead of typing.
Service area
If you go to customers, set your service area to the towns you actually drive to. Not a fifty-mile radius because bigger sounds better — bigger dilutes you and generates calls you turn down.
If you have a storefront customers visit, use the address instead.
If you work from home, choose the service-area option and hide the address. This is supported and doesn't cost you anything in rankings.
Hours, including holidays
Wrong hours are worse than no hours. Somebody driving to a closed business leaves a one-star review, and Google demotes profiles it thinks have bad information.
Set the holiday hours in advance. It takes ten minutes a year and prevents the most avoidable bad review there is.
Photos
The most neglected field, and one of the most effective.
Cover photo, logo, the truck, the crew, the storefront, and — most importantly — the work. Before and afters. Ten to twenty to start, then a few more every month.
A profile with photos from this month reads as an operating business. One where the last upload was 2023 reads as a maybe.
The description
750 characters. Say what you do, where, and what makes you the obvious pick. Write like a person.
It has less ranking weight than the fields above, but people read it, and AI assistants quote from it.
Q&A
Anyone can ask a question on your profile. Anyone can also answer — including your competitors, and including you.
Post the eight questions you get asked constantly and answer them yourself. It's allowed, it's useful, and an empty Q&A section is a missed opportunity sitting in plain sight.
Posts
Short updates that appear on your profile. Weekly is plenty. A finished job, a seasonal reminder, an offer.
They expire, so this is ongoing rather than one-and-done — but a profile with a recent post outranks an identical one without.
Rather hand this to somebody? Start here — no setup fee, cancel anytime.
Reviews, which are half the battle
Volume, recency, and replies. In that order of how much people talk about them, and roughly the reverse order of how much they're neglected.
Ask out loud, at the moment they're happiest. That's when the job's done and they're standing there looking at it. "Would you mind leaving a Google review? It genuinely helps." Then text them the link before you drive away.
Reply to every one. Including the bad ones. Especially the bad ones. A calm, specific reply to a one-star review sells better than the five-star above it, because it shows a stranger what happens when something goes wrong.
Never buy them. They get detected, they get removed, and profiles get suspended for it.
Why you might still not show up
Distance. The map favors businesses near the searcher. You will not rank in a town forty minutes away as well as you do in your own. This is the one you can't fix — you can only fix everything else.
Category mismatch. See above. Most common fixable cause.
Thin profile. Half the fields empty, four photos, no services listed.
Review gap. If the three businesses in the map each have ninety reviews and you have six, that's the gap.
A duplicate profile. Sometimes two exist and they compete with each other. Search hard for a second listing and request a merge.
What to do every month
Ten minutes. Add two or three photos, post one update, answer any new questions, reply to new reviews, and confirm the hours are still right.
That's the entire maintenance job. It's less time than one sales call and it compounds.
The honest summary
This is free, it takes about an hour to set up properly and ten minutes a month to keep, and it's the highest-return marketing work available to a local business. There is no paid product that beats it and nothing else on your list should come first.
Want it filled out, kept current, and handled? Tell us about your business — you see the plan before you decide anything.
