This is the full checklist. Work through it in order, because the early items change what the later ones are worth.
Claim and verify the profile
Nothing else counts until the listing is yours. An unclaimed profile can still appear on the map, built from what Google has scraped, but you cannot edit it, reply to reviews, or stop somebody else suggesting changes to it.
Search your business name on Google. If you see "Own this business?" or "Claim this business", start there. Verification is usually a postcard, a phone call, a video, or an email, and Google decides which. Video verification has become the common one for service businesses: you film your premises, your equipment and your signage in a single unbroken take.
What good looks like: you can sign in and edit the profile directly. If a previous agency or a former employee holds it, request ownership through the profile rather than creating a second listing. Duplicate listings compete with each other and dilute your reviews.
Choose the right categories
Your primary category is the single strongest relevance signal on the profile. It is also the one most businesses get wrong, usually by choosing something broader than what they actually do.
"Contractor" matches almost nothing specific. "Bathroom remodeler" matches the searches you want. The same trap catches dentists sitting on "Dentist" when half their revenue is cosmetic work, and law firms sitting on "Lawyer" when they want personal injury cases.
Add secondary categories for everything else you genuinely do. You can have several, and they widen the range of searches you can appear for without diluting the primary.
How to check it in 2 minutes: search the job you most want more of, then look at what the top three businesses use as their category. Compare it with yours.
What good looks like: a primary that names your bread-and-butter work, plus honest secondaries. Nothing listed that you would not actually take a booking for. Bear in mind that changing a primary category makes rankings wobble for a week or two before it settles, so choose deliberately and change it once.
Leave your business name alone
This is the one place where the obvious trick will hurt you.
Google's guidelines require your profile name to match your real-world name, the one on your signage and your paperwork. "Smith Roofing" is fine. "Smith Roofing | Emergency Roof Repair Springfield" is not.
Keyword-stuffed names do often rank better, briefly, which is why you see them. They also get reported by competitors through a one-click form, and the penalty is suspension of the entire listing. Recovering a suspended profile takes weeks of appeals, if it succeeds at all, and you lose every review in the meantime.
What good looks like: your actual trading name, and nothing else.
List every service
Services are how Google connects a search phrase to your business. Anything you do that is not listed is a search you cannot be matched to.
Most profiles list two or three services and offer fifteen. Write down the last ten jobs you quoted for, then check how many appear on the profile. The gap is usually the fastest win available to you.
Name them the way a customer would say them, not the way the trade does. People search "leak repair", not "moisture ingress remediation".
What good looks like: every job you would actually turn out for, in customer language, with the highest-value work near the top.
Set the address or the service area correctly
Two kinds of business exist here and the distinction matters.
If customers come to you, show your address. A shop, a practice, a restaurant.
If you go to customers, you are a service-area business. Hide the address and list the towns you cover instead. Without those towns, your reach collapses to the area immediately around your pin, which for most trades is a fraction of where you actually work.
Do not list the whole county to cast a wider net. A service area you cannot realistically service produces cancelled jobs and the reviews that follow them. Match the list to your website, because an inconsistency between the two works against you.
What good looks like: the real towns you would drive to on a busy day, and the same list on your website.
Get the hours right, including the exceptions
Being open at the moment somebody searches is one of the strongest ranking factors there is. It is also the item that produces the angriest reviews when it is wrong, because somebody has physically travelled to a locked door.
Set your regular hours honestly. If you answer emergency calls at midnight, the profile has to say so, or you are invisible for the searches that pay best.
Then set special hours before every public holiday. Google prompts you ahead of the major ones, and acting on that prompt takes a minute.
What good looks like: hours that describe how you really operate, plus holiday hours set in advance rather than on the day.
Add real photos, regularly
Customers cannot judge your work from a rating. Photos are how they decide whether you look competent, clean and real.
Two things matter: how many, and how recent. A profile whose newest photo is two years old reads as a business that has stopped trading. Aim for twenty or more, and add a batch after each completed job or each month, whichever comes first.
Use your own photos. Stock imagery is recognisable and it undercuts exactly the trust you are trying to build.
What good looks like: 20+ genuine photos, the newest less than a month old, weighted towards finished work rather than your logo.
Ask for reviews, and answer all of them
Reviews do two jobs. They are a ranking signal, and they are the thing a customer reads before deciding.
Recency matters more than the total. A steady trickle of new reviews beats a large pile from three years ago, because it signals a business that is active right now. So ask after every job, at the moment the work is finished and the customer is happiest. Not in a follow-up email three weeks later.
Reply to everything, including the criticism. What a prospective customer is really reading is how you behave when something went wrong. A calm, specific reply to a complaint sells better than a wall of five stars.
Two rules that are not optional. Never pay for reviews or offer anything in exchange, which breaches Google's policies and is unlawful in many markets. And never ask only the customers you expect to be positive. Review gating is against the rules and it is detectable.
If you work in a regulated field, keep replies general. A dentist or a lawyer should never confirm in public that somebody was a patient or a client.
What good looks like: new reviews arriving every month, every one answered within a day or two.
Post something every week
Posts are the cheapest activity signal available. They appear on your profile and they tell Google the business is alive.
Nobody needs them to be clever. A finished job, a seasonal reminder, an offer, a note about availability. What matters is the rhythm, because months of silence reads as "possibly closed" at exactly the moment somebody is choosing.
What good looks like: one post a week, even a short one, kept up through the quiet season.
Fill in the attributes and answer the questions
Attributes are the filters customers use to narrow a list: wheelchair access, parking, accepting new customers, languages spoken, payment methods, outdoor seating. They are quick to set and they remove you from searches when they are missing.
The Q&A section is the one nobody checks. Anybody can post a question on your profile, and anybody can answer it, including people who do not work for you. Read yours. You can also post your own frequently asked questions and answer them, which is a legitimate way to put useful information where people look.
What good looks like: every attribute that applies is set, and no unanswered or incorrect question sitting on your profile.
Keep your details consistent everywhere
Your name, address and phone number should match across your profile, your website and any directory you appear in. Inconsistency makes Google less confident that the listings describe the same business, and confidence is part of what it is weighing.
This does not require a citation-building campaign. Fixing your own website and the two or three directories you already appear on covers most of it.
How to tell whether it is working
Give it a few weeks. Ranking movement is gradual, because Google is weighing signals over time rather than reacting to a single edit.
Watch the performance panel on your own profile for calls, direction requests and website clicks. Those are the numbers that mean something. Then search your main service from a few different points around your area, because rank changes with the searcher's location and your position at your own front door is not the position a customer across town sees.
