Most of the local business listings I look at around here are about forty percent filled in. Name, phone, address, one category, a couple of photos from three years ago. Then a whole lot of blank space that Google was ready to show people.
That blank space is the cheapest thing you will ever fix. It costs you an hour on a Sunday and it changes who Google shows you to, because Google can only match you to a search if you have told it what you actually do.
Why the empty fields matter more than they look
When somebody types “well pump repair near me” into their phone, Google is not reading your mind. It is reading your listing and everything attached to it. If your listing says “plumber” and nothing else, you are competing on one word against every plumber in the county. If it says plumber and also lists water heater replacement, well pump repair, repiping, slab leaks, and the towns you drive to, you can be matched to dozens of different searches instead of one.
The second thing that happens is quieter. Two listings come up side by side. Yours has hours, services, photos from this year, and answers to the questions people always ask. The other one has a phone number. The person taps yours, because it feels like a business that is open and paying attention. You never see that decision happen. You just get the call, or you do not.
The fields almost nobody fills in
- Services. This is the big one. Every job you will do, written the way a customer would say it, not the way your industry says it. “Toilet won’t stop running” beats “fixture diagnostics.” Add a sentence to each one. Most listings I open have zero services listed.
- Service area. Name the actual towns. Lancaster, Indian Land, Fort Mill, Heath Springs, Kershaw. People search with their town in the box and they want to see it back in writing before they trust that you will drive out there.
- Secondary categories. You get more than one. A roofer who also does gutters and siding should say so. Picking only your main category throws away the other searches you could win.
- Hours, including the odd ones. Special hours for holidays, and a note if you take emergency calls after hours. Google will show a business as closed on the Fourth of July when you are working, and closed businesses do not get called.
- The description. Not a slogan. Who you are, how long you have been doing this, what you do, where you do it. It is the only place on the listing where you get to sound like a person.
- Questions and answers. You can ask and answer your own questions. Do you charge for estimates. Do you work on mobile homes. Do you take card. How fast can you get out here. Put the four questions you answer on the phone every single day right there where people can read them.
- Photos, dated this year. Trucks, crews, before and after, the finished work. Not stock images. Ten real photos of your own jobs will do more than a hundred dollars of anything else.
- Attributes. Small checkboxes, easy wins: veteran owned, family owned, on site services, appointment required, wheelchair accessible entrance. People filter and choose on these more than you would think.
- The link. Point it at a page that talks about the job people are searching for, not just your home page. If somebody clicks from a well pump search, land them on well pumps.
- Messaging. Turn it on only if somebody is actually going to answer it. A message that sits unread for two days is worse than no messaging at all.
Two things I would leave alone
Do not stuff your business name with keywords. “Smith Plumbing Lancaster SC Water Heaters” is against the rules and it is one of the fastest ways to get a listing suspended. That is a genuinely bad week for you, because while it is down you disappear.
Do not put an address you do not really work out of. If you run out of your house and you drive to customers, set yourself up as a service area business and hide the address. Renting a mailbox in the next town over to look local there is the kind of thing that gets caught, and it puts everything else you built at risk.
The part that keeps working after the hour is over
A filled in listing is not a one time job, but it is close. The two things worth doing after that: add a short post every couple of weeks so the listing looks alive, and keep asking for reviews. Everything else stays done.
What surprises owners is how fast it moves. This is not a six month play like a website climbing the rankings. Google can start matching you to searches you were invisible for within days of you telling it what you do. I have watched a listing go from showing up for one thing to showing up for fifteen without a dollar of advertising, because the information was finally there.
The reason nobody does it is not laziness. It is that the fields are spread out, half of them are buried behind menus, and nothing tells you that you left anything blank. There is no big red warning. You just quietly get shown to fewer people than your competitor down the road.
If you want to know what yours looks like
I will go through your Google listing and your website and send you a plain write up: what is filled in, what is blank, what your competitors have that you do not, and the specific things I would fix first. No charge, no obligation, and if you want to handle it yourself with the list I send, that is a fine outcome. If you would rather I take care of it, the options are in the report.