Business Info: Get the Foundation Right First
Every other item on this checklist sits on top of business info. Get this wrong and nothing above it holds. Start with your business name field: it should match your legal or DBA name exactly, no keyword stuffing ("Smith Roofing Best Roofer Orlando" gets suspended, not ranked). Google's guidelines are explicit on this and it is the single most common reason we see contractor profiles get flagged.
Next, the address and service-area setup. This is where trades split into two camps. A plumber, electrician, HVAC tech, or landscaper who drives to the customer should set up as a service-area business (SAB): hide the street address, list every city and zip you actually cover, and let Google know you don't take walk-ins. A contractor with a storefront, showroom, or yard customers visit (a fence supplier, a cabinet shop, a tile showroom) should show the address and pin it accurately.
Get hours right and keep them current. If you run 24/7 emergency service, roofing tarp-downs, HVAC no-heat calls, plumbing burst pipes, say so with "Open 24 hours" or special hours for emergency response, not just your office hours. A profile that says "closed" at 9pm on a Tuesday when you actually answer emergency calls costs you calls Google would have otherwise sent your way.
Fill the business description field completely (750 characters available, use them) with what you do, where you do it, and how long you've been doing it. No keyword stuffing here either, write it like you'd explain the business to a new hire.
- Business name matches legal/DBA name exactly, no keywords added
- Service-area business setup correct for trades without walk-in customers
- Every city/zip you actually serve listed in service areas
- Hours reflect real hours, including emergency/24-hour availability if applicable
- Business description filled out completely, written for humans
- Primary phone number matches the number on your website (NAP consistency)
NAP consistency (name, address, phone matching across your website, GBP, and directories) is a ranking factor that lives outside the profile itself; that's Local SEO / Google Maps territory, not this checklist's job to teach.
Categories and Services: Where Most Contractor Profiles Leave Calls on the Table
Categories and services are where we find the most missed opportunity on contractor profiles we take over, more than photos, more than reviews. Google uses your primary category as one of the strongest signals for which searches your profile shows up on, and most contractors set it once at signup and never touch it again.
Your primary category should match the single service that drives the most revenue, not the broadest possible label. "General Contractor" is too vague if you actually specialize in kitchen remodels. "Roofing Contractor" beats "Construction Company" if roofing is the work. Then stack secondary categories for every real service line: a roofer who also does gutters picks "Gutter Cleaning Service" and "Siding Contractor" as secondaries if those are genuine offerings, not just categories that sound good.
The services section is separate from categories and gets ignored more often. This is a list of individual services, each with its own name, description, and (optionally) price or price range. A painter's services list should include interior painting, exterior painting, cabinet refinishing, deck staining, whatever the actual menu is, each with a two-to-three sentence description. An electrician's list should separate panel upgrades, EV charger installs, generator hookups, and troubleshooting calls. Google matches searches to specific services, not just category labels, so a thin services list means missed matches on specific searches even when the category is right.
| Item | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Primary category matches highest-revenue service | Strongest single signal for map-pack matching |
| Secondary categories cover every real service line | Widens the searches you can match without diluting focus |
| Every service listed individually with a description | Matches specific-service searches, not just category searches |
| Services reviewed and updated quarterly | Seasonal work (gutter guards, AC tune-ups) needs to surface at the right time of year |
Review this section every quarter. Trades change what they push seasonally (gutter guards before fall, AC tune-ups before summer) and the services list should reflect that.
Photos: The Library Google (and Homeowners) Actually Trust
Profiles with a complete, current photo library earn more clicks to calls than profiles with a handful of stock-looking exteriors. Google's own guidance points the same direction: businesses with more photos get more requests for directions and website clicks than those with fewer. For contractors, photos also do double duty as trust signal, a homeowner deciding between three profiles in the map pack looks at photos before reading a word of copy.
Cover four categories at minimum. Exterior/vehicle shots (branded trucks, a job site sign, the crew in company gear) prove you're a real, local operation. Team photos put faces to the business, which matters more for trades where a stranger is entering someone's home (plumbers, electricians, HVAC techs) than for exterior-only trades (roofers, fence installers, hardscape crews). Before/after job photos are the highest-value category for almost every trade: a re-roof, a repainted exterior, a finished deck, a remodeled kitchen. Equipment and crew-at-work photos round it out and help categories like excavation, demolition, or tree service where the work itself is visual proof of capability.
- At least 10-15 photos live on the profile at any time, refreshed, not just accumulated
- Before/after job photos for your top 2-3 services
- Recent photos added monthly, dated work reads as an active business
- Logo and cover photo set and sized correctly (cover photo is the first thing seen)
- No stock photography. Homeowners and Google both discount it
- Photos geotagged to the job location where the tool allows it
Skip stock photography entirely. It's an easy tell for a homeowner comparison-shopping three contractors, and it doesn't help the freshness signal Google rewards with genuinely new uploads. A trade angle worth naming here: a painter or a remodeler has an easier time building a photo library than a plumber, because the finished work is inherently visual. Plumbers, electricians, and HVAC contractors should lean harder on before/after equipment shots (old panel vs. new panel, old water heater vs. new) and crew-at-work shots to compensate.
Posts, Q&A, and Products: The Sections Contractors Forget Exist
Three sections of the dashboard sit unused on most contractor profiles we take over: Posts, the Q&A section, and (for some trades) Products or Services highlights. All three are freshness and information signals Google reads, and all three take minutes, not hours, to maintain once a rhythm is set.
GBP Posts function like a mini social feed attached to the profile. Post weekly if possible, at minimum every two weeks. Rotate between three post types: a completed job (photo plus one line on the work), a seasonal reminder (gutter guards before storm season, AC tune-ups before summer, chimney inspections before winter), and an offer or call-to-action post. Posts expire after seven days for the standard type, which is exactly why a stale, months-old post count is such a visible sign of a neglected profile.
The Q&A section is public and anyone can ask or answer, including competitors posting misleading answers. Seed it yourself. Add the five questions homeowners actually ask before hiring your trade ("Do you offer free estimates?" "Do you handle emergency calls?" "Are you licensed and insured?" "What areas do you serve?" "How soon can you get someone out?") and answer them as the business. This closes the door on a stranger posting a wrong answer that sits there unanswered for months, which happens more often than most owners realize since nobody's watching that tab.
- Weekly or biweekly GBP posts, rotating job photos, seasonal reminders, offers
- Five to ten owner-seeded Q&A entries covering the most common pre-hire questions
- Products/service-highlight section filled in where the trade supports it (materials, brands installed, warranty tiers)
- Monitor Q&A monthly for unanswered or incorrect public answers
The Products section (or Services highlights, depending on the current dashboard layout) is worth filling in for trades that install branded materials: a roofer naming shingle brands and warranty tiers, an HVAC contractor naming equipment brands and SEER ratings, a fence contractor naming material types. It's a small section, but it's one more place a homeowner's specific search ("GAF roofer near me," "Trane installer") can match the profile.
Reviews: The Profile-Side Half of Reputation
This checklist covers reviews only as they live on the profile itself: the review link, the response habit, and the volume/recency signal Google reads. Full review-generation strategy, request timing, and cross-platform response management belong to Reputation & Reviews, not here.
On the profile side, three things matter. First, your review link (the shareable link that opens the review box directly) should be set up and easy to find, since every request you send should point there instead of asking a customer to hunt through Google search results for your listing. Second, every review gets a response, positive or negative, ideally within 48 hours. A response to a five-star review can be short and genuine. A response to a negative review should stay factual, calm, and never argue in public, offer to take it to a phone call.
Third, and this is the one owners underestimate: review recency matters almost as much as review count. A profile with 80 reviews from three years ago and nothing since reads as stale to both Google's algorithm and a homeowner scrolling dates. A profile with 30 reviews, five of them from the last month, reads as an active business. If your review count has stalled, that's a signal to look at the request process (Reputation & Reviews territory), not something this profile-side checklist can fix alone.
- Review link set up and used in every request (not a generic search-and-find ask)
- Every review responded to within 48 hours, positive and negative alike
- Negative reviews handled factually, never argued in public
- Recency tracked, not just total count. A steady trickle beats a stalled total
One more profile-side item: the star rating itself isn't editable, but flagged reviews (fake, from a non-customer, containing profanity or personal info) can be reported through the dashboard for removal. That's a profile-management task, distinct from the broader review-generation work.
Suspension Risk: What Trips the Wire and How to Avoid It
Contractor profiles get suspended more often than most industries, mostly because of two things: address violations (an SAB profile that keeps a visible pin at a home address, or a business that lists a P.O. box or virtual office as its address) and shared-address violations (multiple businesses, or multiple "locations" of a franchise-style operation, listed at the same address without Google recognizing the legitimate multi-brand setup). A third common trigger is a name field that includes marketing language instead of the actual business name.
The fix for most of this is prevention, not reaction: get the SAB setup right the first time (covered above), keep the business name field clean, and don't create a second listing for the same business at the same address, that's the single fastest way to trigger a duplicate-listing suspension on both profiles.
If a profile does get suspended, this checklist isn't the place to walk through reinstatement. That's a longer, more technical process (documentation, the reinstatement request form, sometimes a wait of several weeks) and it has its own guide.
- Business name field stays clean: no keywords, no marketing taglines
- SAB address hidden and service areas listed correctly from day one
- Never create a second profile for a business already listed at that address
- Keep licensing and business documentation on hand in case verification is ever re-requested
The Maintenance Cadence: What This Looks Like Month to Month
A checklist that gets done once and forgotten decays within a quarter. Google rewards freshness, and a contractor's actual business (crew changes, new equipment, seasonal service pushes, new reviews coming in) changes constantly, so the profile should track it. Here's a realistic cadence, not a daily-task list nobody sticks to.
Weekly: one GBP post, review and respond to any new reviews that came in. Monthly: add three to five new photos (recent jobs, not a backlog dump), check the Q&A section for new unanswered questions, glance at the insights/performance data for anything unusual (a sudden drop in calls or views often means a category, hours, or suspension issue worth investigating immediately). Quarterly: review the full services list against what's actually being sold that season, confirm hours are still accurate, spot-check that the primary category still matches the highest-revenue service line.
- Weekly: one post, respond to new reviews
- Monthly: 3-5 new photos, Q&A check, glance at performance insights
- Quarterly: services list refresh, hours check, category confirmation
This is exactly the workload that turns into a part-time job nobody on a contractor's team wants, which is the whole reason a dedicated GBP management service exists as a category. A shop that manages profiles only for home-service trades knows a plumber's cadence looks different from a painter's (seasonal posts land on different calendars) without having to relearn the trade from scratch on every account.