More people searched for help with their Google Business Profile in the UK over the past year than at almost any point before. Searches for “google business profile management service” and “google business profile help” have both roughly quadrupled. “What is google business profile” is up sharply too, alongside them.
That is not a sign the tool got harder to use. It is a sign more businesses now have one, and most of them do not know what to do with it once it is claimed.
For a builder, that matters more than it sounds like it should. Your Google Business Profile is the free panel that appears next to your name in a search and as the pin on the map when someone nearby looks for a trade. If you are running ads on Facebook or Google, this is very often the second thing a homeowner looks at, straight after clicking. What they find there decides whether the click you already paid for turns into a call.
It gets checked before the phone rings
Picture the sequence from the homeowner’s side. They see your ad, or they search “builders near me” after seeing your van in the street. They tap through, and before they read a word of your website, Google has already shown them a card: your name, a star rating, some photos, your opening hours, and whether you are open now.
If that card is thin, out of date, or missing entirely, the doubt creeps in right there. Was this business a builder who did a couple of jobs and stopped, or one that is doing this properly? A profile with no photos, wrong hours, or an address for the wrong town does not say incompetent. It says unmanaged. On a trade where the whole sale rests on trust before a stranger lets you into their house, unmanaged is enough to lose the call.
Everything you spend on ads is trying to get somebody to this point. The profile is what they judge you on the moment they arrive.
What a complete profile actually has on it
A profile that is doing its job has your correct category, so you show up for the right searches rather than a generic one. It lists the services you actually do, not a default list Google guessed at. It carries real photos of finished work, not the stock thumbnail left over from when it was claimed. It states the areas you cover, which matters for a trade where you travel to the job rather than the customer coming to a shop. Opening hours are current, including bank holidays, because nothing looks less managed than “open now” showing at 11pm on a Sunday.
There is also a public question and answer section, and anyone can post an answer to a question on your profile, not just you. Left unattended, a rival or a random visitor can answer first, and their answer stands until somebody spots it. Reviews sit on the profile too, and they carry real weight, but they are their own subject with their own argument to make properly, which is the next piece in this run rather than a paragraph tacked on here.
Where the free version runs out
None of the above costs anything to set up, and that is exactly why most profiles end up neglected. There is no bill reminding anyone to look at it.
The work that keeps a profile converting is small and constant rather than large and occasional: catching an incorrect edit before it goes live, keeping categories and services matched to what is actually bringing in enquiries rather than what seemed right on day one, adding new project photos as jobs finish, answering questions before somebody else does, and checking a competitor has not set up a duplicate listing for your business a few streets away.
None of that is difficult on its own. Together, done properly, alongside live ad campaigns that depend on the profile holding up its end, it is more than most builders have spare time for in an evening. That is the point at which “set it up once” stops being enough, and the profile needs the same ongoing attention as the campaigns pointing traffic at it.
What we do with it
We set the profile up properly first: the right category, the full service list, real photos, service areas that match where you actually work. Then we keep it maintained alongside whatever paid campaigns we are running for you, so the two are pulling in the same direction rather than one undermining the other. An ad that lands on a strong profile converts at a different rate to the same ad landing on a bare one.
If your profile has been sitting untouched since somebody claimed it years ago, or you are running ads and have never checked what a click actually finds once it lands, talk to us about lead generation for trades and construction. We will look at what is there now and tell you plainly what it is costing you.
Get in touch and we will take a look.