The Google Business Profile checklist for Australian trades

Most trade profiles are about 40 percent complete. Not because the owner is lazy, but because Google buries half the useful fields and never explains which ones matter.

This is the full list, in the order we work through it when we take over a profile.

Before anything else: is the profile verified, and do you own it? A surprising number of trade businesses are working on a profile someone else controls — a former marketing agency, a previous employee, or an auto-generated listing nobody has claimed.

You should be the primary owner. Anyone helping you, including us, should be added as a manager. If you ever part ways, you remove their access and keep everything.

Your profile name must be your actual business name. Adding keywords — 'Smith Plumbing Sydney Emergency Blocked Drains' — violates Google's guidelines and is one of the most commonly reported violations by competitors. Suspension costs weeks.

Your primary category does more for rankings than any other field on the profile. Choose the most specific category that describes your main work, then add secondary categories for genuine additional services.

Do not add every plausible category. Irrelevant secondary categories dilute relevance and can pull you into searches you cannot service well.

• One primary category, chosen as specifically as possible.
• Three to five secondary categories, all genuinely accurate.
• Review categories annually — Google adds and retires them.

If you travel to your customers and don't receive them at a premises, you should be configured as a service-area business with the address hidden. Google supports this explicitly. Displaying a home address does not help rankings and does compromise your privacy.

Set service areas to the suburbs you will genuinely attend. A tight, honest list outperforms a sprawling one.

This is the most under-used feature on the entire profile. Every service you offer can be listed separately with its own description. Google matches searches against these entries.

A plumber with twelve individual service listings — blocked drains, hot water replacement, gas fitting, backflow testing and so on — is eligible for far more searches than one with a single paragraph description.

Set hours honestly, including public holidays. Listing 24/7 when nobody answers overnight produces missed calls and negative reviews, and Google increasingly surfaces 'usually answers' style signals.

Photos are both a trust signal and an activity signal. A profile receiving new job photos every week reads as active; one with six photos from 2022 does not.

Real work, real sites. Stock imagery is obvious and it undermines the thing photos are there to do.

Reviews need to be requested continuously, and every review should be replied to — positive and negative. Replies are visible to future customers and demonstrate how you handle problems.

Never filter or gate reviews. Sending happy customers to Google and unhappy ones to a private form breaches Google's policies and, in Australia, risks being treated as misleading conduct.

Posts keep the profile active and can surface offers or seasonal services. The Q&A section is public and anyone can answer — including competitors — so seed it with the questions you actually get and answer them yourself.

Your business name, address and phone number should match exactly wherever they appear: the website, directories, social profiles, invoices. Inconsistency dilutes prominence and creates duplicate listings.