Google Business for Tradespeople: What Moves You Up the Map Pack
Updated: Jul 31
Google Business for tradespeople is sold as an ongoing job. Post every week, add photos every month, keep the profile looking active. Most of that does nothing for your rankings. Below is what moves a profile up the map pack, what has no effect at all, and why the profile on its own will only ever win you work within a few miles of your door.
What a Google Business Profile does for a trades business
Your Google Business Profile is the free listing that puts you in the map pack, the three businesses shown above the normal results on a local search. It decides whether you appear there at all. For a local trades business it's usually the quickest route to enquiries, and it's also the most limited one.
The map pack sits above everything else on a search like "electrician near me", so it takes a large share of the clicks before anyone scrolls. That's the upside. The downside is that it's governed by where you are, and you can't do much about where you are.
The three things Google says decide local rankings
Google publishes this. Local results come down to relevance, distance and prominence.
Relevance is how well your profile matches the search. This is the bit you control at setup, through your categories, services and business details.
Distance is how far you are from the person searching. You can't change this without moving.
Prominence is how well known you are. Google defines it by how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have, and says outright that more reviews and better ratings can help your local ranking.
Read that list again and note what isn't on it. No mention of posting frequency. No mention of photo uploads. Google has told everyone what counts and the industry has spent years recommending things that aren't on the list.
Getting the setup right
Almost all of the ranking value in a Google Business Profile is captured during setup. Do it properly once and the profile will do what it's capable of doing.
Primary category
This is the single biggest decision on the profile, because it decides which searches you're eligible for. Get it wrong and you vanish from the terms that matter.
Don't guess it. Search your main term in Google Maps, then use the GMB Everywhere extension to look at the primary category on the profiles already ranking. Whatever the top few are using, use that. For electricians the obvious pick is usually right, but for trades that sit across two categories, like a firm doing both driveways and patios, the ranking profiles will tell you which one Google associates with the searches you want.
One primary category only. Everything else goes in as secondary.
The rest of the setup
None of this is complicated. It just has to be finished properly:
Add every secondary category that supports the primary one, and nothing that doesn't
List every service you offer, and write a custom one where Google's list doesn't have yours
Set opening hours to 24/7 so you show up when someone is searching at 8pm and other businesses are "closed"
Add all relevant links: website, quote form, booking page
Add every attribute that applies, eg free estimates, on-site service, emergency callout
Make your name, address and phone number identical everywhere they appear online
Upload a decent set of photos so the profile isn't bare
The NAP consistency one gets ignored and it shouldn't. If your business name has "Ltd" on the website and not on the profile, or your street is abbreviated in one place and spelled out in another, that's a small amount of doubt introduced for no reason.
Service areas, your address, and why proximity caps you
Set your service areas to the towns and counties you cover. That's what they're for and there's no reason to leave them empty.
It won't do what you're hoping though. Proximity is one of the strongest factors in local results, and in our experience a client's profile ranks in the map pack for the town they're based in and not much further. Cover four counties and set all four, and you'll still be showing up in one town.
Search Engine Land's work on proximity bias covers why this happens and how the radius shifts by search term and how built-up the area is. There's no published number, and anyone quoting you an exact mileage is guessing.
One other thing. Profiles with no address rarely rank, because Google doesn't know where you are and distance is a factor it has to calculate. If you're working from home and you've hidden the address, you can still be found, but you're asking Google to rank you on a factor you've withheld.
So a roofer in one town isn't going to appear in the map pack three towns over, no matter how good the profile is. Which is a problem, because roofers usually travel a lot further than three towns for work.
Why your website matters more than your profile
Two reasons, and both of them are the reason we don't treat the profile as the main job.
The first is that the map pack listing rarely closes anyone on its own. Most people tap through to the website before they enquire. They want to see finished work, check you're insured, read a couple of reviews and get a feel for whether you're the sort of firm they want on their drive. If the site is slow, thin or looks like it was built in 2014, you've paid for the click and lost the job. The profile gets you seen. The website gets you hired.
The second is reach. Your profile is capped at a few miles. Your website isn't. Ordinary search results have no proximity limit in the same way, so a page built around a service in a particular town can rank for that town whether you're based there or twenty miles away. That's how you cover the rest of your patch, and it's the bulk of what an ongoing SEO plan is paying for.
The profile is a one-off job with a hard ceiling. The website is the part that keeps growing.
Google reviews are the only ongoing job worth doing
Once setup is done, reviews are the one thing left that changes where you rank. Google names them under prominence and says more reviews and positive ratings can help.
So ask on every job. A text with a direct link to the review page on the day you finish gets the best response, because that's when the customer is happiest with you and most likely to bother.
Two profiles with the same categories, the same services and the same distance from the searcher will usually be separated by review count. It's the only lever left that you can pull as often as you like.
If you can, ask the customer to mention what you did and where. "They fitted a new fuse board at our place in Stafford" is more useful than "great service". Whether review text feeds into rankings is argued over among SEOs and Google doesn't document it, so we won't tell you it's a ranking factor. Our position is that having the service and the town in there doesn't hurt, and it reads better to the next person deciding whether to call you.
Photos and posts don't affect your rankings
They aren't ranking factors. That's why Google doesn't list them.
Every guide on this subject tells you to post weekly and upload photos monthly to signal that your profile is active. None of them cite anything, because there's nothing to cite. Google has published its three factors and neither posting frequency nor photo uploads appear anywhere in them.
Photos are worth doing anyway
Not for rankings. For the person looking at the profile.
Somebody comparing three driveway companies in the map pack will open the photos before they open the website. A profile with fifteen real finished jobs on it gets more clicks than one with a logo and a stock image of a hammer. That's a conversion gain, not a ranking gain, and it's still worth having.
Use your own photos. Before and afters, vans, the team, finished work. Twenty decent ones uploaded once beats one a week forever.
Posts are close to pointless
Google Business posts work like a small social feed on your listing. The theory is that regular posts show Google you're active.
Ask yourself how many times you've checked a company's Google posts before ringing them. Nobody does. They look at the star rating, they look at a few photos, and they either call or click the website. The posts sit there unread, and they don't feed into rankings either.
If you enjoy doing them, no harm. If you're paying someone to do them weekly on the basis that it improves your rankings, you're paying for nothing.
Where to put your effort
Get the setup right once, properly, with the correct primary category and every field completed. Then ask every customer for a review and keep asking.
That's the whole of Google Business for tradespeople. The profile will then do as much as a profile can do, which is win you work close to home. Everything past a few miles is won on the website, and that's where the rest of the effort belongs.
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