Most contractors we look at have a Google Business Profile that was claimed once and never touched again. That profile is free, it is the single biggest lever in local search, and it is sitting there half-finished while a competitor with worse work takes the calls.
The full playbook runs to seven moves. If you only have an hour this week, do these three.
1. Fix your primary category
Your primary category carries more weight in the map pack than anything else you can edit. One field.
Open your profile, go to the business information, and look at what it says. Contractors get this wrong in two ways. Some pick something too broad, “Contractor,” when the money is in “Roofing Contractor.” Others picked the right thing years ago and never added the secondary categories for the work they do now.
Set the primary category to the exact service you most want to be called for. Then add secondary categories for the rest, up to nine, using the real ones Google offers. Do not stuff. A plumber who does not install HVAC should not be in the HVAC category, and Google is better at noticing that than it used to be.
Time: ten minutes. It can move your ranking inside a couple of weeks.
2. Put ten real photos up
Profiles with current photos get more calls and more direction requests than profiles with a logo and nothing else. Google says so, and every contractor who has done it has watched it happen.
Go through your phone. You already have the pictures. Look for:
- Job photos. Before and after, work in progress, the crew on site.
- Your trucks. With the wrap and the phone number visible.
- Your people. Faces build more trust than equipment does.
- The finished work. The thing the homeowner is buying.
Upload ten. Take one new one every week after that. The point is not the total count; it is that the profile keeps moving. A profile that got its last photo in 2023 reads as a shop that might not be open.
Time: twenty minutes. Then two minutes a week.
3. Ask your last ten happy customers for a review
This is the one everybody skips and it is the one that compounds. Reviews are the trust signal a homeowner reads before they dial, and review volume and recency both feed the map pack.
Get your direct review link from the profile (“Ask for reviews” gives you a short link). Then text your last ten customers, the ones you know were happy. Something like:
Hi Sarah, glad the new water heater is running right. If you have a minute, a quick Google review helps us a lot: [link]
That is the whole ask. No script, no incentive, no gift card. Buying reviews gets profiles suspended, and Google is good at catching it.
Then reply to every review you get, good and bad. Google reads the replies as activity, and homeowners read them to see how you handle yourself when something goes wrong.
Time: fifteen minutes. More on the timing and the wording in how to get more Google reviews.
That is the hour
Categories, photos, reviews. None of it costs money and none of it needs an agency. If you do those three this week and keep the photos and reviews moving after, you will see the profile climb.
The rest of the playbook, the fields nobody fills in, the Q&A, the posting cadence, is in the full Google Business Profile guide, and how the map pack ranks you is in how to rank on Google Maps.
Who this is and is not for
If your profile is already complete, photographed, and gathering reviews every week, you are past this post; the map-pack guide is the better read. If you have not opened your profile in a year, this is the hour that pays for itself.
If you would rather hand it off, that is what we do. A free game plan reads your current Google Business Profile against the contractors beating you locally and shows you in plain terms where you are losing the map pack and what each fix is worth in booked jobs. A few days, no call unless you want one, yours to keep. Get my free game plan.