The Google Business Profile checklist most Irish businesses fail

The fields that actually matter

Your primary category does more work than anything else on the profile. Google matches searches to categories before it matches them to your description, so a business listed as Contractor when it should be listed as Roofing contractor is invisible for the searches that matter. Change it and nothing else, and you will usually see movement.

Secondary categories help, but only where they are genuinely accurate. Adding six unrelated ones dilutes the primary signal rather than broadening your reach.

Services and service areas

If you travel to customers rather than serving them at a premises, set your service area to the towns you actually cover and hide your address. A service-area business showing a home address in a housing estate looks wrong and ranks for the wrong place.

Then list your services individually. Not 'plumbing' but boiler repair, bathroom installation, leak detection, power flushing. Each one is a phrase somebody searches, and each one is a field Google reads.

The things nobody fills in

Opening hours including bank holidays. Attributes such as wheelchair access or free parking. The business description, which should say what you do and where, not that you are passionate about quality. Photographs, which need to be yours and recent.

Every one of these is a field Google can read and a question a customer might have. Leaving them blank is not neutral, it is a gap your competitor has filled.

• —Primary category set to the most specific accurate option
• —Service area set to real towns, address hidden if you travel
• —Every service listed individually
• —Opening hours, including bank holidays
• —At least twenty of your own photographs, added over time not all at once
• —Description that names what you do and the areas you cover
• —Products or price ranges where they apply
• —Messaging turned on only if somebody will answer it

Photographs and posts are not decoration

Profiles with regularly added photographs get more views and more calls, and the effect is not subtle. Adding twenty images in one afternoon and never returning is far less useful than adding two a week for a year.

Posts matter less than photographs but they cost nothing. A short note about a job you finished, with a picture, is enough.

What will not work

Keyword-stuffing your business name is against the rules, and competitors report it. So do fake addresses, and Google has become good at spotting a virtual office.

The profile is one of the few places in marketing where doing the boring thing thoroughly beats being clever, because the ranking factors are largely mechanical.