When someone googles your trade nearby, the map results at the top are Google Business Profiles. It is free, and setting yours up properly is the highest-leverage half hour in your whole marketing. Here is how to do it, including the bits most tradies skip.
The basics (do these first)
- Claim and verify your profile so you actually control it.
- Get the business name, phone number and service area right. List the suburbs you genuinely cover, not all of Melbourne.
- Set your hours, and say if you do emergency or after-hours work.
- Pick the right categories: a primary one (like Electrician) plus any relevant extras.
The bits tradies miss
- Photos. Real job shots, your van, your team. Profiles with photos get more calls, and most tradies have none.
- Your services list. Spell out each service you offer, like switchboards, EV chargers or emergency callouts. It helps you match more of what people search.
- The description. You get 750 characters. Plain English, your suburb, your trade, what you do. ChatGPT can draft it for you (see how tradies can use ChatGPT).
- Reviews. The single biggest factor for both ranking and trust. Ask after every job, and get them onto your own website too.
- Reply to every review, good or bad. Here is how to handle the bad ones.
The honest bit
All of this is free and you can do it yourself in an afternoon. The catch is keeping it alive: fresh photos, a steady flow of reviews, the odd update. That upkeep is where most tradies quietly fall off, and a half-finished profile that has not moved in a year slips down the results.
Once the profile is doing its job, people start ringing the number on it, and that is where most tradies quietly lose the work. BizEdge does one job: every call you cannot pick up gets a text back in seconds with your name and your business, and the caller's number lands on your phone. It is $49 a month plus GST, month to month, and the billing only starts once it has caught your first missed call. Setup is one code on your phone, and it works on Telstra, Optus and Vodafone.