Your Google Business Profile is the page customers see before your website
When a homeowner searches for an electrician, the first thing they see is not a website. It is a Google Business Profile with a phone button, opening hours, photos and reviews, and most of the decision happens there. This article explains how Google ranks those listings, what a trade business must keep current on its profile, and why the profile only pays off when the phone number on it gets answered.
An electrical contractor with seven staff spent four thousand euros on a new website last year. It is fast and it looks good. The owner cannot understand why enquiries have not moved.
Search for "electrician" plus the town on a phone and the answer is on the screen. Above the websites sits a map with three listings. Each has a name, a star rating, a count of reviews, opening hours, a photo, and two buttons: Call and Directions. The contractor's listing shows 4.2 stars from nine reviews, "Closed" because the hours were never set, and a photo of a fuse board taken in 2019. The listing below it shows 4.9 from 71, "Open", and a photo of a smiling crew in front of a van. Most searchers press Call on the second one and never see either website.
The four thousand euros were not wasted. They were spent on the second page of the customer's journey, while the first page was left as Google found it.
How Google ranks the map listings
Google's own help documentation says local results are ranked on three things: relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well the listing matches what was searched, which comes from the categories, the services listed and the words in reviews. Distance is the searcher's location against the address or service area. Prominence is how well known the business is, and that is where reviews, review replies, photos and activity on the profile count.
Whitespark's 2026 survey of 47 local-search specialists estimates review signals at around 20 percent of the local ranking formula. That is an aggregated expert estimate, not data from Google, but it is consistent with what any owner sees when they compare their own listing with the one above it.
Two of the three factors are within the owner's control this afternoon. Distance is not, and nothing on the profile changes it.
What has to be right on the profile
The list below is short, and every item on it is something I have seen wrong on the profile of a business that was paying for ads at the same time.
Primary category, and the secondary ones. "Electrician" as primary. Then the services that customers actually search for: EV charger installation, PV connection, emergency electrician if you offer it. A listing with one category competes for one search.
Opening hours that are true, including holidays. A listing that says "Closed" at 10 in the morning on a Tuesday loses the Call button press to the listing that says "Open". Google prompts for holiday hours; answer the prompt.
A phone number that gets answered. The Call button is the most-pressed element on the listing. If it rings into a voicemail box at lunchtime, the profile is sending your best enquiries to the next firm down. This is the single point where the profile and the phone have to be planned together, and it comes up again below.
Photos that are recent and yours. The crew, the vans, finished work, the office door. One new photo a month is enough to keep the listing looking alive. Several local-search analysts reported visibility drops in 2026 for profiles left untouched for more than a month; the exact effect is disputed, the direction is not.
Every review replied to. A reply within a few days, in the firm's voice, to good reviews and bad. Prospective customers read the owner's reply to a one-star review more carefully than the review itself. Google's policy on asking for reviews tightened on 17 April 2026, with no targets for staff and no scripted content; the reviews article covers what that means for asking.
Messaging turned on, and answered. A customer who writes through the profile at 9 in the evening expects a reply that evening. If nobody will answer, leave it off; a message ignored for a day is worse than no message option.
The service area set honestly. A profile that claims a sixty-kilometre radius the firm does not serve gets calls it declines and reviews from people it disappointed.
Where the profile fits in the sequence
Everything above is cheap and most of it is a one-off. What it produces is calls and clicks, which is why it is not the first thing we do.
The clicks land on the website. If the site takes six seconds on a phone and asks for nothing in particular, the click was wasted; that is why the website is the first employee we install. The calls land on the office phone. If the office is at lunch, the Call button sent the customer to voicemail. The AI receptionist exists for exactly that press of the Call button, and it comes fifth in the order because the employees before it, including the profile work that sits inside reviews and referrals, are designed to make the phone ring more.
The reviews come from the third employee, reviews and referrals, which asks every consenting customer the day after completion and drafts replies for the owner to approve. Reviews are the part of the profile that keeps needing feeding, and the part that most directly moves the listing up the map.
What the contractor changed
The contractor set the hours, added five categories, uploaded twelve photos from the phone's camera roll, and replied to all nine reviews in one evening. Then the lunchtime calls started going to the receptionist instead of voicemail, and the review requests started going out the morning after each job.
Nothing changed on the website. Within a quarter the listing showed "Open" when people were searching, had reviews from that month, and was answering its own phone. The Call button started producing booked jobs, and only then did the fast website get the visitors it was built for.
The calculator puts a number on the calls and clicks a listing produces that the business then loses. It is usually larger than the cost of the website that was supposed to fix it.
The map listing is the front door. The website is the hallway. Most trade businesses decorate the hallway and leave the front door as they found it.