Google Business Profile and your website: how they work together

Someone types "electrician Swindon" into their phone, gets the map, and taps whoever looks closest. By the time they reach your website they have already read your opening hours, seen your star rating and had a look at a photo of your van.

So they arrive with expectations. If the site says something different to the listing, the wrong number, the wrong hours, a name they don't recognise, that's usually where the phone call goes missing.

The listing gets you seen, the site gets you hired

Your Google Business Profile has one job: get you in front of someone who is already looking. Name, area, hours, phone, reviews, a few photos. That's it. It answers "are you open and are you anywhere near me".

Everything after that is the website's job. What you actually do, how you work, what it costs, how someone books you.

People try to make the profile do both. Services stuffed into the business name, a description written like a keyword list. It reads as desperate to a customer, and Google has rules about what goes in the name field anyway.

It doesn't work the other way round either. However good your site is, it isn't what shows up in the map results. The two need each other, and they need to be saying the same thing.

Where the two fall out of step

Nobody does this on purpose. The site gets built, the profile gets set up, and then one of them changes and the other doesn't. The ones I see most:

• A mobile on the listing and an old landline on the site, or the other way round.
• Hours updated in one place after you dropped Saturdays, left alone in the other.
• "& Sons Ltd" on the listing, just the trading name on the site.
• An address you moved out of two years ago still sitting on the contact page.
• Services on Google that aren't mentioned anywhere on the site at all.

Each one costs you a real person. They ring the dead number and give up. They drive over on a Saturday because Google said you were open, and now they're annoyed with you before you've met.

Google is also trying to match a business to a place. Details that contradict each other make that harder than it needs to be.

Fill the profile in like you mean it

Do it in this order and it takes half an hour.

Primary category first. Pick the one thing you'd say if someone asked what you do, then add secondary categories only for work you genuinely take on. "Electrician" plus three categories you've never been paid for helps nobody.

Then the service area. The towns you'll actually drive to, not every town within fifty miles. Google's help page on managing your service areas walks through it.

Then the services list, written the way a customer would say it: fuse board replacement, EV charger install, outside lights.

Photos next. Real jobs, the van, you. Stock photos of a smiling stranger in a hard hat fool nobody.

Keep hours current, bank holidays included. And write the description as one sentence you'd say out loud.

What only your website can do

A profile can't hold a price. It can't walk someone through how you work, step by step, or show twelve photos of one finished job in the order they happened. It can't take a booking at half past ten at night and drop it in your inbox.

That's the stuff that makes someone choose you instead of the next one on the map.

Okus Dental is a demo site I built for a fictional dental clinic, and the treatment prices sit right there on the page with a booking form underneath. I've said my piece on prices elsewhere, so I'll leave it there. Downland, a demo for a fictional garden design firm, does the other half: finished work, shown properly.

Both are small sites. My services page has what that sort of build costs.

Reviews, photos and the bit customers actually read

Ask for the review while you're still standing there. Job finished, customer happy, phone in hand. A week later it's on a list behind the school run and it never happens. Google's own tips on getting more reviews are worth two minutes of your time.

Reply to all of them, briefly. Two lines on the good ones. On the awkward ones, no argument, just what you did and an offer to sort it. People read the reply as much as the review.

Never paste a made-up one anywhere, profile or site. It gets spotted.

The join with the website is simple. Photos of a job go on both, same week. And when a review names a specific job, a tricky rewire, a patio done in the rain, that's the page you should write next. The customer has told you what to say.

A fifteen-minute check, twice a year

Put it in the diary for January and July. Fifteen minutes, laptop and phone.

1. Open your profile and your website side by side.
2. Check the business name, phone, email and address or service area match word for word. Not close enough, the same.
3. Check the hours, including anything you changed for the summer and forgot to change back.
4. Check every service listed on Google appears somewhere on the site.
5. Click the website link on the profile. Make sure it lands on your homepage, not a page that moved, and that it loads properly on a phone.
6. Add two photos from recent jobs.

That's the sort of thing I show owners how to do themselves when I hand a site over, so nobody's ringing me to change a phone number.

If the listing is pulling people in and the site it points at is thin, years out of date, or not there yet, tell me what you've got and I'll give you a straight answer about what's worth doing and what isn't. Might be a couple of pages, might be a full rebuild. Either way you'll know where you stand before you spend anything.