Your Google listing is doing more work than your website
For a lot of local businesses the map result is the whole first impression. It is also the bit nobody maintains.
Search for a tradie in your town. Do it on your phone, the way a customer would.
Look at what fills the screen before you scroll. A map, three businesses, star ratings, opening hours, a call button. Nobody’s website is on screen yet.
That block is the first impression now. Often it is the only one, because the customer taps call from there and never visits a website at all.
It is free, it takes an afternoon to set up properly, and almost every one we look at is half finished.
What half finished looks like
Opening hours that were right in 2022. No photos, or one of the shopfront taken from a moving car. The category set to something vague like contractor instead of the thing you actually do. Services not listed. Questions from real customers sitting unanswered underneath.
None of that is a disaster on its own. Together it reads as a business that might not be trading anymore, and it is sitting in the most valuable space on the page.
The assistants read it too
When someone asks an assistant who to call for a blocked drain in their suburb, it is not only reading websites. It leans on the same business data Google holds. Your hours, your categories, your service list, your reviews.
A thin listing costs you twice. Once in the map result a human sees, and again in the answer a machine gives.
What to fix, in order
Boring facts first, because that is what both the human and the machine check. Correct hours including public holidays, the right primary category, your real service area, and a number that rings the phone you carry.
Then services, one line each, in the words a customer would use rather than the words your industry uses.
Then photos taken this year. Your van, your team, finished work. Not stock.
Then reviews. Ask the customers who were happy, and reply to every one you get, including the ordinary four star ones. A business that answers looks like a business that is there.
The honest bit
We are a web studio telling you to spend your afternoon on something that is not a website. That is deliberate.
If your listing is thin and your site is fine, the listing is where the next customer comes from. Fixing it costs you time and nothing else, which is a better return than most things you could pay us for.
Once it is sorted, the website still has to hold up its end. When someone taps through, the page has to be readable by both of them. Our free check tells you whether it is.
Give it a burl.