When we run a local SEO audit for a service business, the first place we look is the Google Business Profile. Not the website. Not the backlinks. The profile.

For a plumber, electrician, roofer, or HVAC company, the profile is where the phone calls come from. It is also where we find the same handful of mistakes, over and over, quietly costing businesses jobs every week. Here are the seven we see most, in roughly the order of damage they do.

1. The wrong primary category

Your primary category is the single strongest signal on the entire profile, and an enormous number of businesses get it wrong. A furnace company listed as "Contractor." An electrician listed as "Handyman." A drain specialist listed under general "Plumber" when "Drainage service" exists.

Google matches searches against categories first. If you are in the wrong one, you are invisible for your best searches no matter how good everything else is.

The fix: choose the most specific category that describes the work you most want, then add secondary categories for the rest. Review it once a year — Google adds new categories regularly.

2. Review counts that stopped growing

Google does not just count reviews. It weighs how recently they arrived. A profile with 200 reviews that stopped eighteen months ago reads as a business in decline; forty of your competitor's reviews from the last quarter beat your dusty two hundred.

The fix is a process, not a plea: every completed job triggers a review request with a direct link, the same day. Businesses that systematize this generate more reviews in six months than they collected in the previous five years.

3. Ignoring reviews — especially bad ones

An unanswered one-star review does double damage. Prospects read it and see a business that does not care. Google sees an unengaged profile.

You cannot delete a bad review, but a calm, factual, professional reply flips its effect. Prospects consistently report trusting a business more after reading a well-handled complaint than a wall of unanswered praise. Answer everything within a few days — two sentences is enough for a five-star, and a bad one deserves your best writing of the week.

4. Photos from 2019

Profiles with recent photos get measurably more calls and direction requests. Yet most trade profiles have five photos: a logo, a stock image, and three shots from whenever the profile was created.

You are sitting on a photo goldmine. Every job site is content: the truck outside a house, the panel before and after, the finished roofline. One photo a week from the field, uploaded in two minutes, keeps the profile alive and shows real work in the cities you actually serve.

5. Wrong or inconsistent business information

Google cross-checks your profile against every other place your business appears: directories, supplier listings, the licensing board, old Yellow Pages data. When your name, address, or phone number disagree across those sources, confidence drops — and so do rankings.

This is tedious to fix by hand, which is why it mostly never gets fixed. It is also why citation cleanup is one of the first things handled in a managed local SEO engagement: it is unglamorous work that produces real movement.

6. A service-area setup that fights the algorithm

Service-area businesses have their own rules, and misconfiguring them is expensive. Common versions: showing a home address publicly when it should be hidden, claiming a 100-mile service radius that dilutes relevance everywhere, or listing one city when the work happens across five.

Define the service area you genuinely cover — for many of our clients that is some combination of Seattle, Everett, Tacoma, and the areas between — and make sure your website says the same thing. Precision beats ambition here.

7. Treating the profile as set-and-forget

Every mistake above shares a root cause: the profile was set up once, years ago, and nobody owns it now. Meanwhile Google keeps changing the product — new attributes, new categories, Q&A sections that customers use and businesses never see, AI-generated summaries built from the profile's contents.

That last one matters more every month. When ChatGPT or Google's AI answers "who's a good roofer near Tacoma," the recommendation is assembled from exactly this data. Keeping it accurate is no longer just about the map pack — it is about what the AI engines say about you too.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I find out which category I'm actually in?

Search your business name in Google Maps and look under your business name — the primary category is displayed there. Compare it against what your best competitor uses; there are only a few thousand categories and the right one is usually obvious once you look.

Someone else claimed my business profile. What do I do?

Google has a formal ownership-request process: request access through the profile, and the current owner has a few days to respond before Google steps in. It is recoverable in most cases — a previous marketing vendor holding a profile hostage is a situation we untangle regularly.

Can I just pay for the top spot instead?

You can — Google sells Local Services Ads and map ads. But you will pay per lead forever, and the organic map positions still go to whoever earns them. The businesses that win long-term treat ads as a supplement, not a substitute.

How often should I update my profile?

Photos weekly if you can manage it, review replies within days, and a full settings review — categories, services, hours, service area — quarterly. If nobody in your business will realistically own that, that is precisely what our local SEO service exists to do.

Get an honest scorecard

We audit profiles as part of every free local SEO assessment: your categories, review velocity, photo freshness, citation consistency, and how you stack up against the three businesses currently taking your calls. It takes us a couple of days and costs nothing. Request your free audit here.