Why Contractors Need a Different Checklist
Our general Google Business Profile optimization checklist covers the fundamentals every local business needs. This version exists because contractors break differently: you hide your address, you serve twenty towns instead of one, your product is a finished job instead of a shelf, and your customers buy once or twice in a decade.
Those differences change what matters. A restaurant can lean on foot traffic and menu photos. A roofing contractor lives or dies on category choice, service-area settings, job photos, and review velocity. Work this list in order, because each step makes the next one worth doing.
Step 1: Name, Category, and Service Areas
Your profile name must be your real-world business name, exactly as it appears on your truck and your license, with nothing appended. "Cascade Roofing" is fine. "Cascade Roofing | Best Roofer Portland" is the fastest way to get suspended, and competitors do report it.
Then the two settings contractors get wrong most often. Your primary category should be the specific trade that pays the bills (Roofing contractor, Bathroom remodeler, Plumber), not the broadest label you could claim. And if customers never visit your shop, hide the address and set service areas explicitly. The working list:
- Profile name: real-world name only, no keywords, no city names, no taglines
- Primary category: the trade that produces the most revenue; check what the current map-pack winners in your town use and close any gap
- Secondary categories: the other trades you genuinely take jobs in, usually three to five
- Address: hidden if you go to customers; service areas set to the cities you actually work, not the whole state on principle
Step 2: Services and Description Built Around Jobs
Add every job type you sell as its own service: roof replacement, roof repair, gutters, siding, each with a short description and a price or range where it makes sense. These fields feed relevance for the exact searches that book jobs, and most contractor profiles leave them empty.
Your business description gets 750 characters. Lead with your trades and your cities, name what makes you different (license and bond numbers, warranty terms, emergency availability), and write for a homeowner, not an algorithm. Google rejects edits that read like keyword lists.
Step 3: Photos Are Your Portfolio
A homeowner hiring a contractor cannot inspect the product before buying, so your photos are the product preview. Upload before, during, and after shots of real jobs, your crew on site, and your trucks. Attach them to the matching service where the interface allows it, and label files plainly before upload.
Then keep the library alive: two to four new photos a month, shot on your phone at finished jobs, is enough. Real beats polished. Homeowners can smell stock photography, and so can the engagement metrics.
Step 4: Build the Review Ask Into Closeout
The best moment to ask for a review is the final walkthrough, when the job is done and the homeowner is happiest. Text the direct review link from your profile dashboard the same day, with a one-line request. No incentives, and no gating, meaning never ask only the customers you expect to be happy. Both violate Google's policies and can kill the profile you are building.
Respond to every review within a few days, and name the job and the city when you do: "Glad the Sherwood kitchen re-pipe went smoothly" reads naturally and quietly reinforces what you do and where. Velocity beats totals. A profile adding four to eight reviews a month will usually pass a competitor sitting on a large but stale count.
Step 5: Posts and Q&A, Especially Before Storm Season
Publish one Google Post a week: a completed job with a real photo, a seasonal reminder (moss season, freeze prep, storm damage), or a financing offer. Posts fade quickly, so rhythm matters more than polish.
Seed the Q&A section yourself with the questions you hear on every estimate: licensing, insurance, price ranges, scheduling lead times, emergency calls. Answer them yourself, then check for new questions weekly, because anyone on the internet can answer them for you, wrongly.
And plan around your surge. The rankings you want when a storm hits in October are built in the quiet weeks of spring: the posts, photos, and reviews you stack then decide who owns the map pack when every homeowner searches at once.
Step 6: Track Calls Like Job Costs
Append UTM parameters to the website and appointment links on your profile so its traffic shows up as its own line in your analytics. Then read the built-in performance reporting monthly: calls, direction requests, website clicks, and the search terms that triggered you.
You would never run a job without tracking materials and hours. The profile is a channel that produces bids; treat its numbers the same way.
When You'd Rather Be on the Job Site
Once set up, this checklist is a few hours a month. If you would rather spend them on jobs, it is also literally what we do for contractors: our map pack optimization service runs the profile, the review cadence, and the city pages as one system, and the free ECARAT visibility audit scores your current presence against five local competitors before you spend a dollar.
We run it across the Pacific Northwest: small business websites in Sherwood, McMinnville web design for wine country trades, SEO in Medford for the Rogue Valley, and as an SEO company in Redmond for Central Oregon.