Type "electrician near me" into your own phone and watch what loads first. Before any website, yours or anyone's, a small map opens with three businesses pinned to it: names, stars, a phone button. That box is the local pack, and for the searches that actually ring your phone, it is the whole game. Most people never scroll past it.
Here's the part that surprises most tradies. The website doesn't get you into that box. Your Google Business Profile does. They're two different machines. One is the site you paid for; the other is the free listing Google quietly built about you, and it's the one doing the ranking.
Google decides those three pins on three things, and it's worth knowing them by name:
- Proximity: how close you are to the person searching. You can't park your van in every suburb, but you can set real service areas so the system knows where you actually work.
- Relevance: whether your profile says what you do. The right primary category, the secondary ones, the services spelled out in plain words. A roofer listed as "Contractor" is a profile telling Google to guess.
- Prominence: how much the rest of the web vouches for you. Reviews, mostly: how many, how recent, and the words inside them. A review that says "fixed a burst pipe in Toowong" is two ranking signals wearing one sentence.
None of that lives on your website. It lives on a listing most owners set up once, in a hurry, years ago, and never opened again.
So the profile is the storefront. What's the website for, then? It's the proof behind the glass: where a careful buyer goes to confirm you're real before they call, and a signal Google reads to decide whether to trust the profile. The two work as a pair. But if you've got attention for only one this quarter, pour it into the profile. That's where the searches are landing.
A short list to do this week, no agency required:
- Claim the profile and fill every field. Empty fields are unanswered questions, and Google reads silence as doubt.
- Set the correct primary category, then add every secondary one that fits.
- Ask your last ten happy customers for a review, and ask them to name the job and the suburb.
- Add real photos: your work, your van, your team. Not stock.
- Keep your hours honest, especially over public holidays.
Do that and the box starts to notice you. It's a quiet sorting machine, running every time someone in your area reaches for their phone, and it's been ranking you all along, whether or not you were looking back.