Your Google profile is a separate ranking system. Most contractors treat it as a listing.
Google Business Profile optimization for US residential contractors. The map pack has its own ranking factors, its own spam problem, and its own economics — and for most contractors it produces more enquiries than the website does. It’s also the cheapest thing on this site to fix.
- 01 Primary category: “General Contractor”
- 02 No services or products listed
- 03 11 photos, none since 2023
- 04 Address public for a mobile business
- 05 Competitors keyword-stuffing names
- 01 Specific primary + secondary categories
- 02 Full service list with descriptions
- 03 Geotagged project photos, monthly
- 04 Service area set, address hidden
- 05 Spam competitors reported and removed
The highest-ROI asset you own is the one nobody maintains.
For a local contractor, the map pack usually drives more enquiries than the website. The profile costs nothing, ranks on different signals than your site, and can move within weeks. And yet almost every contractor profile we audit has the same handful of unforced errors sitting in it for years.
- The primary category is too generic“General Contractor” tells Google you might do anything. “Kitchen Remodeler” or “Deck Builder” tells it exactly which searches you’re a candidate for. This single field moves rankings more than almost anything else on the profile.
- Services and products are left emptyThese fields are indexed and most contractors ignore them entirely, leaving relevance signals unused while competitors fill them.
- Photos stop after the first monthFresh, geotagged project photography is one of the few ongoing signals you fully control, and it’s the first thing to lapse.
- Competitors are cheating and nobody reports itKeyword-stuffed business names, fake addresses at virtual offices, and lead-gen profiles clog the map pack in most metros. These are reportable, and removals are frequently granted — but only if someone actually files them.
Directional weighting based on observed map-pack behaviour. Google does not publish a ranking formula.
Four workstreams. The first two are nearly free.
We’d rather you knew which parts you can do yourself in an afternoon than pay us for all of it. The configuration work is genuinely quick. The ongoing work is where an agency earns its retainer.
Configuration & Categories
Primary and secondary categories, full service list with descriptions, service area definition, hours, attributes, and business type. Two hours of work that frequently moves rankings inside a month.
Get this audited →Review Velocity Programme
A steady pace of reviews matters more than a large historical total, and reviews mentioning specific services and suburbs carry more weight than “great job.” We build the request process into your job completion.
Get this audited →Ongoing Profile Activity
Monthly geotagged project photos, posts tied to real work, and seeded Q&A answering what buyers actually ask. Small signals individually; compounding when maintained.
Get this audited →Spam Removal
Identifying and reporting keyword-stuffed names, fake addresses, and lead-gen profiles in your map pack. Slow, unglamorous, and one of the few ways to move up by moving someone else out.
Get this audited →Four fixes worth doing before you pay anyone, including us.
These are free, take an afternoon, and are the highest-leverage things on the entire profile. If you do nothing else from this page, do these — and if they alone solve your problem, you’ve saved yourself a retainer and we’d rather you knew that.
- Change your primary category from something generic to the most specific accurate option, then add every relevant secondary category
- Fill the services section completely, with a real description under each service rather than a bare list
- Check your business type — if you travel to customers, hide the address and define a service area instead
- Ask your last ten clients for a review and request they mention the specific work and their suburb
What the system looks like when it’s working.
Into the top 3 in five weeks, before any website work started.
A remodeler ranked outside the top ten in their own suburb with a profile listing them as a general contractor and no services filled in. Recategorising, completing the profile, restarting photography, and reporting two keyword-stuffed competitors produced movement before the SEO engagement had properly begun.
Get this analysis for your business →Three tiers. GBP work is in all of them.
We don’t sell profile optimization as a standalone retainer — it’s a few hours of setup plus ongoing maintenance, and charging a monthly fee for only that wouldn’t be honest. It’s included in every tier below.
- Complete GBP configuration audit + fix
- Review velocity programme
- Monthly photo and post cadence
- Spam reporting in your map pack
- Local SEO for 1 metro
- Grid-based rank tracking
- 1 strategy call / month
- Everything in Growth
- Managed Google Ads (up to $10K/mo spend)
- Local Services Ads + Google Guaranteed
- Call tracking + recording + attribution
- Landing page A/B testing
- Bi-weekly strategy calls
- AI Search entity setup
- Everything in Accelerate
- Multi-location profile management
- Multi-metro expansion (up to 3 cities)
- Ongoing competitor spam enforcement
- AI citation active monitoring
- Priority support (24-hr response)
- Weekly strategy calls
Google Business Profile — answered.
Can we just do this ourselves?
The configuration work, genuinely yes — and we’ve listed the four highest-impact fixes on this page so you can. Category selection, filling the services section, and correcting your business type are an afternoon’s work and often produce the biggest single jump. What’s harder to sustain alone is the ongoing part: monthly photography, a review programme that doesn’t lapse, and the tedious business of reporting spam competitors month after month.
How is this different from Local SEO?
Local SEO is the geographic architecture across your whole service area — which suburbs get pages, how they’re structured, how authority flows between them. This page is about one asset: the profile itself, which ranks in the map pack on its own signals. They work together, but a profile can be fixed in a week while service-area architecture takes months.
Should we hide our address?
If you travel to customers rather than serving them at your premises, yes. Google’s guidelines are explicit about this, and a public residential address for a mobile business risks suspension as well as ranking oddly. Contractors with a genuine showroom customers visit should keep it visible.
Do posts actually help?
Modestly, and mostly indirectly — they add freshness and give searchers something to engage with, but they’re not a major ranking lever on their own. Anyone selling you a retainer built primarily on weekly posts is selling activity rather than results. Photos and reviews do considerably more.
Is reporting competitors worth the effort?
In most metros, yes. Keyword-stuffed business names and fake addresses are common, they’re against Google’s guidelines, and removals are granted reasonably often. It’s slow and it needs documentation, but removing two spam profiles above you is sometimes the fastest route into the top three.
Who owns the profile?
You do, always. We work inside your profile with manager access — we never create it under our own account, and you can revoke our access at any time without losing anything.
Want your profile audited on the call?
30-minute strategy call. We open your Google Business Profile live, walk through the configuration errors, scan your map pack position across your service area, and flag any spam competitors ranking above you. You keep the findings whether or not you hire us.
- Live profile configuration audit
- Grid scan of your map pack position
- Spam competitor identification
- Straight numbers — no fluff, no pitch, no obligation