Google Business Profile for Bristol tradespeople: the 12 fields that matter
We audit a lot of Bristol trade profiles. The average one has three of these twelve fields wrong, and the primary category is wrong on roughly a third. Fixing them is free, takes an afternoon, and moves the map pack faster than anything you can do to your website.
Key takeaways
- Primary category outranks everything else. One wrong word here caps your visibility.
- Services and their descriptions are indexed; most profiles leave them empty.
- Hours must be right at Christmas and bank holidays, or Google quietly demotes you.
- Photographs uploaded monthly correlate with map pack position in every audit we have run.
- Reply to every review inside a week, including the good ones.
Fix them in this order
- Primary category. Pick the single closest match, not the broadest. "Electrician" and "Electrical installation service" pull different map packs. Test both before you settle.
- Secondary categories. Up to nine, all genuinely true. Adding "EV charging station installer" is often the cheapest new lead source a Bristol electrician has.
- Services, with descriptions. Every job you take, each with 100 words. This text is indexed and almost nobody fills it in.
- Service area. The postcodes you actually cover. Listing the whole South West dilutes you and helps nobody.
The other eight
- Business name: your real trading name, with no keywords bolted on. Keyword stuffing here gets profiles suspended.
- Hours, including special hours for bank holidays and the Christmas fortnight.
- Phone: one number, matching your website and every directory.
- Website link: to the most relevant page, not always the homepage.
- Attributes: "on-site services", "online estimates", accessibility and payment options.
- Photographs: a minimum of four a month, of real jobs, geotagged if your phone does it.
- Products: for trades, use this for fixed-price jobs such as an EICR or a consumer unit swap.
- Q&A: seed it yourself with the five questions you get asked most, and answer them.
Reviews, briefly
Volume, recency and replies, in that order of effort and roughly reverse order of difficulty. A text after every completed job with a direct review link will double most trade profiles inside six months. It is the first thing SEO Bristol sets up for any trade client, before a single page is written. Never buy reviews and never write them: Google is good at spotting both and the penalty is losing the profile.
Questions people ask
How long until a profile change shows?
Category and service changes typically show in the map pack within two to four weeks. Review effects are slower and steadier.
Should I hide my address if I work from home?
Yes, set it as a service-area business. Hiding the address does not harm ranking, but an unverified or mismatched address does.
Do posts help?
Marginally for ranking, usefully for conversion. One a fortnight is plenty.
We do this as part of local SEO. Profile rebuild and monthly upkeep from £299 a month, from a Bristol SEO agency that does the work itself.
Local SEO Bristol