How contractors can use Google Business Profile to get more local leads
A practical setup guide for trades covering what to enter on your profile, how service areas and reviews work in Canada, and a 15-minute weekly routine that keeps it current.
When a homeowner needs a trade, the search often starts on a phone with a few words and a town name, such as an electrician in Moncton or a roofer near Kelowna. What they see first is usually a map with a handful of local businesses, each showing a rating, some photos and a button to call. A customer can choose who to phone without ever opening a website.
That map listing comes from a Google Business Profile. A Google Business Profile for contractors sits exactly where local customers are already looking, which is why it can matter more than any single page on your own site. Setting one up takes an afternoon, and keeping it useful takes about fifteen minutes a week.
Short answer A Google Business Profile is the listing that shows your business on Google Maps and in local results. Contractors should set it up as a service-area business, hide their home address, and list the cities or postal codes they serve. Choose an accurate primary category, add a business phone number you'll actually answer, and upload photos of real jobs. Then ask every satisfied customer for a review, reply to each one, and spend fifteen minutes a week keeping the profile current.
This guide is written for trades that go to the customer, such as electricians, plumbers, roofers, painters and cleaners, rather than shops with a storefront. It covers the setup, the Canadian rules on reviews, and a routine to keep the profile working once it's live.
What a Google Business Profile does for a trade business
A profile answers the questions a customer has in the first ten seconds. Do you do this kind of work? Do you cover my area? Are you any good? How do I reach you? If the answers are clear and recent, the customer calls. If the photos are three years old and the hours are wrong, they move on to the next listing.
It also works differently from a website. A website waits for someone to find it, while a profile appears alongside the map for local searches, often before any website does. For a solo trade or small crew, that makes it a practical first place to be found, and the main cost is your time.
Setting up a Google Business Profile for contractors
The setup decisions that matter most come before any photos or reviews. Get the basics wrong here and the profile shows the wrong area, reveals your home address, or breaks Google's rules on how a business can be listed.
Set it up as a service-area business
Most trades work at the customer's address, which makes them a service-area business in Google's terms. Google's business guidelines say a service-area business should hide its address from customers. Google uses a plumber working from home as its own example.
With the address hidden, you list the areas you serve instead. According to Google's service area guidance, you set them by city, postal code or another type of area rather than a radius, with up to 20 areas. Google also suggests the overall area shouldn't be more than about two hours of driving time.
Keep the name and listing honest
The same guidelines say there should only be one profile per business, and that adding unnecessary information to the business name isn't permitted. So "Hartley Electric" is fine, while "Hartley Electric Best Electrician Halifax 24/7" isn't. A rented mailbox where you don't operate doesn't qualify as an address either.
The setup checklist
Here's what we'd enter in each field, in the order most contractors fill them in:
| Field | Enter |
|---|---|
| Name | Your real business name, exactly as it appears on your quotes and invoices |
| Category | One primary category for your main trade, plus only the secondary ones you do regularly |
| Address | Your address for verification, then hidden from customers |
| Areas | The cities or postal codes you actually serve, up to 20 |
| Phone | A business number you'll answer, not a number you plan to change |
| Website | Your own site, or a page that shows recent work and a way to get in touch |
| Hours | The hours you take calls, including weekends if you answer then |
| Services | Each service you offer, named the way customers describe it |
| Photos | Real jobs, with before and after where you have them |
| Description | Two or three plain sentences on what you do, where, and for whom |
Once the checklist is done, two fields deserve more thought than the rest, because they decide whether a profile visit turns into a conversation. Those are the phone number and the photos.
Which phone number should go on your profile?
The number you choose will be on Google for years, and customers will save it in their phones. Once it's out there, changing it means losing the people who saved the old one. So it's worth choosing carefully before the profile goes live.
Putting your personal cell on a public listing has two costs. Work calls arrive at dinner with no way to tell them apart from family calls, and you can't easily hand the number to a helper or separate it from the business later. A dedicated business number that rings on the phone you already carry avoids both, and keeps work conversations together in one place.
Whatever number you use, answer it, or call back quickly. A profile can bring the call in, but it can't do the follow-up.
Photos that show the work
After the phone number, photos carry the most weight with a customer deciding between three trades. They're the closest thing to seeing your work before you arrive. A well-lit before and after of a finished bathroom says more about your standards than any description you could write.
A few habits make photos far more useful:
- Take them on every job, at the same few angles, so before and after line up.
- Show the finished work in good light, with tools and offcuts cleared away.
- Add a small number regularly rather than fifty at once, so the profile always looks current.
- Skip stock images. Customers can usually tell, and they want to see your work.
If you already take photos for your own files, the extra effort is choosing the best two each week and uploading them.
How to ask for reviews, and the rules in Canada
Photos show what your work looks like. Reviews tell a customer what you're like to deal with, and that's often the deciding factor between two businesses with similar photos.
The best moment to ask is when the job is finished and the customer has just told you they're happy. Send a short text with a direct link to your review form that evening, and keep the request simple. Something like "Thanks again for having us. If you have a minute, a Google review helps other homeowners find us" works well. Ask every customer the same way, rather than choosing only the ones you expect to be glowing.
What the Competition Bureau expects
Reviews fall under the Competition Act's rules on misleading marketing, which apply to anyone promoting a business. In a January 2024 notice on employee reviews, the Competition Bureau said employees must disclose any connection to a business they review, even when the review is an honest opinion. It also said anyone who writes or permits reviews that give a false or misleading impression could be liable.
In practice, that means a few clear rules for a trade business:
- Don't write reviews of your own business, or ask family to.
- If a crew member or relative does leave one, they must state the connection in the review.
- Don't pay for reviews or post them on a customer's behalf.
- Don't offer a discount in exchange for a positive review.
Reply to every review
A reply shows future customers how you handle people. For good reviews, a short thank-you that mentions the job is enough. For a negative one, stay calm, acknowledge the specific issue, explain what you did about it and offer to talk by phone. Customers reading later will judge the reply as much as the complaint.
The 15-minute weekly profile routine
Setup and reviews are the foundation. What keeps a profile useful after the first month is a short routine done on the same day each week. Here's the one we suggest:
- Add two or three photos from jobs finished that week, with before and after where you have them.
- Reply to new reviews, positive and negative, using the approach above.
- Send review requests to customers whose jobs wrapped up since last week.
- Check hours and closures, especially before holidays or a week away.
- Answer any questions posted on the profile, and update your services if you've added one.
Put it in your calendar for a quiet time, such as Friday afternoon or Monday morning. Fifteen minutes a week is enough to keep a profile looking active, which is exactly what a customer comparing three listings notices.
Turning profile calls into booked jobs
A busy profile creates a new problem, which is more calls and messages arriving at awkward moments. The profile's job ends when the customer reaches out. From there, the job is yours, and it depends on answering, following up and knowing where each enquiry came from.
That last point gets overlooked. If you know which jobs started from your profile, you know whether the weekly routine is paying off. If every enquiry lands in the same text thread as your family and suppliers, you can't tell, and some of those calls never get returned.
How StrikeHoney works with your Google Business Profile
StrikeHoney is built to catch what your profile brings in. Each part below maps to a step in this guide.
- The number on your profile. You get your own business phone number, included in the plan. It rings on the phone you already carry, so the number on Google isn't your personal cell, and your personal number stays private.
- One inbox for every enquiry. Calls, texts and email land in one inbox, threaded by customer and by job. A call from your profile and a text from a past customer don't get mixed up with personal messages.
- Knowing where work comes from. Each lead is tagged with its source, so you can see which jobs started from your profile. A lead that sits too long without a follow-up gets flagged before it goes cold.
- A website built from your job photos. Pick your best job photos and they go onto your own website, with no builder and no hosting to manage. Enquiries from the site land in the same inbox as your calls and texts, and you can use the site in your profile's website field.
From there, one tap turns a lead into a quote, with the customer's details and conversation carried across. Everything here comes on a single plan, with the business number and website included rather than sold as extras. It's $24/mo CAD, or $19/mo CAD when you pay once a year. See how our lead tracking feature handles them.
The bottom line
A Google Business Profile for contractors is one of the most direct ways to be found by local customers, and it rewards accuracy and consistency more than cleverness. Set it up as a service-area business, choose an honest name and category, use a business number you'll answer, and show real photos of real jobs. Ask every customer for a review, follow the Competition Bureau's rules on disclosure, and keep the profile current with fifteen minutes a week.
Once the calls start coming in, make sure each one has somewhere to land. Our lead tracking page shows how StrikeHoney keeps every call, text and enquiry in one inbox on your own business number.
Google Business Profile questions
Your profile brings in calls, and StrikeHoney gives those calls somewhere to land. Put your StrikeHoney business number on the profile and it rings the phone you already carry, with calls and texts kept in one inbox and filed against the right customer. Each lead is tagged with where it came from. It's $24/mo CAD, with the business number included.
No, not if customers never visit it. Google's guidelines say a service-area business should hide its address from customers. You then list the areas you serve by city or postal code, and the profile shows those areas instead of your home.
Pick the one category that best describes your main trade, such as Electrician, Plumber or Roofing contractor, as your primary category. Add a small number of secondary categories only for work you actually do regularly. A narrow, accurate category is more useful to a customer than a long list.
Ask every satisfied customer, at the point the job is finished and they've just told you they're happy. Send a short text with a direct link to your review form, so it takes them a minute. Then reply to each review that comes in, good or bad, within a few days.
We'd avoid it. The Competition Bureau lists incentives for positive reviews among the tactics behind fake reviews, and reviews that give consumers a misleading impression can create liability under the Competition Act. Asking every customer, with no reward attached, is the safer approach.
Only with clear disclosure. The Competition Bureau says employees must disclose any connection to the business they review, even when the review is honest. If the connection can't be shown clearly in the review, the Bureau's advice is that they shouldn't post it.
Reply calmly and briefly, in public, within a few days. Thank them, acknowledge the specific issue, explain what you did or will do, and offer to continue the conversation by phone. Avoid arguing the details online, because future customers read the reply as much as the review.
Weekly is a good rhythm for a busy trade. Add a few photos from recent jobs, reply to new reviews, check your hours and holiday closures, and answer any questions. Fifteen minutes on the same day each week keeps the profile current without taking over your schedule.
