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Why it outweighs the website
Search “scaffolders near me” on a phone. Above the organic results sits a map with three businesses. That is the map pack, and on local service searches it takes the large majority of the clicks and calls. The call button is right there — the searcher never has to visit anyone's website at all.
Which means for a local trade firm, a well-run Business Profile is usually worth more than a great deal of website work. It is also free, and most competitors treat it as a set-and-forget listing from four years ago.
Getting the setup right
Primary category. The strongest single lever. Choose the most specific accurate option — “Scaffolder” or “Roofing contractor”, not “Construction company”. Add secondary categories for genuine additional services, but do not pad the list; irrelevant categories dilute rather than add.
Service area versus address. If customers do not come to your premises, run it as a service-area business and hide the address. Set the areas honestly — the towns you actually work in. Listing forty towns does not help, because Google weights proximity to the searcher heavily regardless of what you claim.
Services. Populate this properly, every service, each with a description. Most profiles leave it empty. It is free relevance and takes twenty minutes.
Business name. Your actual registered trading name. Stuffing keywords in — “ABC Roofing | Roof Repairs Southampton” — is against the guidelines, competitors report it, and it can get the profile suspended. Suspension is a genuinely bad month.
Hours, and attributes. Accurate hours, including whether you genuinely take emergency calls. Fill in the attributes — on-site services, free estimates, appointment required — because some of them appear as filters.
Photographs
Photographs matter more here than almost anywhere else, and recency counts. Profiles with regular new photographs perform better than dormant ones.
What to upload, monthly:
- Completed jobs — three or four from the last few weeks
- Before and after pairs, which are the most engaging thing on any trade profile
- Your vans and your team — recognisability builds local trust
- Work in progress, which reads as real in a way staged shots do not
Take them on a phone. Genuine site photography outperforms polished stock imagery in this sector consistently, because it is obviously real. Avoid stock entirely — customers recognise it and it undermines everything else on the profile.
The review system
Reviews influence both ranking and whether anyone calls, and this is where most firms fail — not because customers are unwilling but because nobody asks consistently.
Three principles.
Ask every time, automatically. A text the day the job completes, with a direct link to the review form. Build it into the job so it does not depend on anyone remembering. This alone typically multiplies review volume several times over.
Steady beats bulk. Four a month forever beats thirty in one week. A sudden cluster looks manufactured, is treated as such, and the recency of your newest review is a live signal.
Reply to all of them. Positive ones briefly and specifically — mention the job. Negative ones calmly, factually and without arguing. Prospective customers read the negative reviews first and are judging your response far more than the complaint.
Never buy reviews or write them yourself. It is detectable, it is against the guidelines, and the profile suspension that follows costs more than the reviews were ever worth.
Posts and questions
Posts appear on your profile and signal activity. One a week or fortnight is plenty: a finished job with two photographs and two sentences. Not marketing copy — “Chimney scaffold in Bishopstoke this week, up Tuesday, struck Friday” is exactly right.
Questions and answers is the underused feature. Anyone can ask a question on your profile, and you can ask and answer your own. Seed the questions customers actually have: what areas do you cover, are you insured, how quickly can you get out, roughly what does it cost. Those answers then appear to everyone who looks.
Mistakes that suppress a profile
- Keyword-stuffed business name. Guideline breach, frequently reported, risks suspension.
- Wrong or over-broad primary category. Quietly costs you rankings for the searches that matter.
- Inconsistent name, address and phone number across the web. Pick one format and use it everywhere.
- A dormant profile. No new photos, no posts, newest review eleven months old.
- Multiple profiles for one location. Duplicates split your signals; merge or remove them.
- Unanswered questions sitting on the profile, sometimes answered wrongly by strangers.
How to tell if it is working
The profile's own performance reporting shows searches that surfaced you, split into direct (people looking for you by name) and discovery (people looking for a service and finding you). Discovery searches are the ones that indicate local SEO progress.
Watch three numbers monthly: calls from the profile, direction requests, and website clicks. And check where you actually rank — not on your own phone, which is personalised and biased toward businesses you have searched before, but from a few different postcodes across your service area. Ranking in the map pack is highly location-dependent, and your position two miles away can be completely different from your position at your own address.
Rather have someone else do this?We run exactly this for trade and construction firms across the UK. Call and we will tell you what is realistic in your area, including when the answer is that it is not worth it.
Call 07443 392243WhatsAppCommon questions
How long until a new profile ranks?
Verification takes days to a few weeks. Meaningful map pack movement usually takes one to three months of consistent activity — photos, posts and a steady flow of reviews. It is one of the fastest organic wins available to a trade business.
Can I rank in towns I do not have an address in?
Partly. Google weights proximity to the searcher heavily, so you will rank strongest near your actual location and progressively weaker further out. Setting service areas helps at the margins; it does not override proximity. This is why a genuinely local page and local reviews matter for outlying towns.
What if I get an unfair negative review?
You can request removal if it breaches the guidelines — not a genuine customer, offensive, or off-topic — but success is inconsistent. In practice, a calm factual public reply plus a run of recent positive reviews does more than a removal request. Future customers read the reply.