Google Business Profile Optimisation for Trades Businesses

A lot of Google Business Profile advice online is either outdated or written for retail businesses with a shopfront, which doesn't map cleanly onto a trades business running from a van. Here's what's actually worth getting right first, in roughly the order it matters.

1. Categories, before anything else

Your primary category is one of the strongest relevance signals Google has. Pick the category that most precisely matches your core service — "Plumber" rather than the broader "Contractor" if plumbing is genuinely what you do. Secondary categories can broaden what you show up for, but adding categories that don't reflect real services is more likely to confuse relevance signals than help them. If you don't do a type of job, don't claim the category for it.

2. Service areas that match reality

As a service-area business, you define the towns, postcodes or regions you cover instead of a single fixed address. Be accurate rather than ambitious — a list padded with areas you rarely actually work in dilutes relevance for the areas that genuinely matter to your business.

3. Business description and services list

Write the description in plain language that matches how customers actually search — "emergency boiler repair" rather than vaguer phrasing like "heating solutions." Fill in the services list completely and specifically; each named service is another way your profile can match a relevant search.

4. Photos and ongoing activity

A profile with a handful of photos from when it was first set up, and nothing added since, reads as dormant. Regularly adding photos of real completed work signals an active business — and this is exactly what happens automatically as a side effect of publishing jobs through Fusion44, since every completed job becomes part of your growing public record rather than a one-off upload you have to remember to do manually.

5. Reviews — volume, recency and responses

• Volume: more reviews generally outperform fewer, all else equal
• Recency: a steady trickle of new reviews outperforms a cluster of old ones
• Responses: replying to reviews, especially less positive ones, shows an active, engaged business

6. Business hours and contact details

Small and easy to overlook, but profiles with complete, accurate hours and contact information are treated as more trustworthy and complete than ones with gaps. It takes minutes to fix and is worth doing before anything more advanced.

None of these six areas is a secret, and none of them guarantees a specific ranking outcome — Google weighs many signals, and no single change moves the needle in isolation. What they have in common is that they're all things a business fully controls, unlike competitor activity or search volume. Getting them right, and then keeping the profile active rather than treating it as a one-time setup task, is the most reliable foundation for everything else.