Owners who decide to fix their web presence usually start with the website. It's the thing they can picture, and it's the thing a designer will sell them. But for local service work, most of the deciding happens somewhere else entirely — in the block of results that appears above the website links, with the map and the star ratings.
That block is built from Google Business Profiles. Yours is free, it probably already exists whether you made it or not, and for a lot of businesses it's doing more work than the website ever will.
Why it outranks the homepage in practice
Someone searching for a service near them is not browsing. They want to know three things: are you close, are you open, and did other people have a decent experience. All three are visible in the results block without clicking anything.
By the time somebody visits your actual website, they've usually already narrowed to two or three options using that block. The website's job at that point is to not lose them. The profile's job is to get them there at all — and it's the harder job.
What actually moves it
Categories. Your primary category is the single most important field, and a lot of profiles have a vague one. Pick the most specific category that describes the work you actually want more of. Add secondary categories for the rest, but the primary one carries the most weight.
Service area and address. If you go to customers rather than them coming to you, set a service area and hide the street address. A service-area business with a visible home address looks wrong to customers and can create problems with verification.
Hours, including holidays. "Open now" is a filter people use. Wrong hours cost you calls you'd have wanted, and worse, they generate the specific kind of bad review that starts with "said they were open."
Photos, updated. Profiles with recent photos get more engagement, and it's one of the few things fully in your control. Job site photos beat stock images, and a photo of the actual truck or the actual crew beats both. Add a few every month rather than fifty once.
Reviews, and specifically recent ones. Volume matters less than people think and recency matters more. Ten reviews from this year read better than forty from four years ago. The most effective thing most businesses can do is simply ask, at the moment the job finishes and the customer is happy — not in an email three weeks later.
Replies to reviews. Reply to all of them, including the good ones, and especially the bad ones. Prospects read the replies. A calm, specific reply to a complaint does more good than the complaint does harm; a defensive one does the reverse.
The Q&A section. Almost nobody fills this in, and anyone can add a question to your profile — including a competitor. Seed it yourself with the questions customers actually ask, and answer them.
What to ignore
Posts on the profile do very little for most service businesses. Descriptions stuffed with keywords do nothing and read badly. Anyone offering to "rank you #1" for a monthly fee is selling you the same checklist above with a markup.
Where the website still earns its keep
None of this makes the website optional. It's where the profile sends people, and a profile pointing at a dead or stale site undoes the work. But the order matters: a good profile with a plain website outperforms a beautiful website with a neglected profile, nearly every time.
If you're going to spend an afternoon on your web presence, spend it on the profile first.