Most trades in our part of the world work out of a truck and a garage. There is no lobby, no sign, no place a customer would ever walk into. Google's profile setup still asks you a lot of questions that assume there is, and the wrong answer to one of them can make your listing behave strangely for years.
Here is how a service-area business fills the thing out, in the order Google asks.
The question that decides everything else
Early in setup, Google asks whether customers can visit your location. If your work happens at the customer's house, the honest answer is no. Answering no turns your listing into a service-area business, which hides your street address from the public and shows your service area instead.
This matters for a reason that has nothing to do with search rankings. If you leave your home address showing, that is what appears on maps, and that is where people show up (more on that in running a business out of your house). A water heater guy running out of a subdivision in Eureka does not want strangers in the driveway on a Sunday.
Google may still ask for an address to verify you exist. Verifying an address and displaying an address are two different settings. Check both before you walk away.
Your service area is a promise, not a wish list
The temptation is to list every town within ninety minutes. Resist it. Your service area should be the places you will actually drive to on a normal Tuesday for a normal job, at your normal price.
There is a practical reason. Every call from a town you listed but will not drive to costs you the two minutes it takes to say no, and it costs the caller the time they spent waiting for you. Nobody wins.
When we set up an assistant, we ask two things: which of the 53 trades you do, and which towns you will drive to. Those are the same two answers your Google profile needs. Write them down once and use the same list in both places, so the phone and the profile agree.
Around St. Louis this gets specific fast. Listing the metro as one blob is not the same as listing Pacific, Wildwood, Ballwin and Valley Park. If you cross the river for work, say so. If you do not, do not.
The primary category does most of the work
You get one primary category and a handful of additional ones. The primary one carries the most weight, and it should describe the job you most want to be called about, not the widest umbrella you can find (more on that in local SEO for a one-truck business).
A man who mostly clears drains and occasionally swaps a water heater is better off with the narrow category as primary if drain work is what pays. Then add the others underneath. Adding twelve loosely related categories does not make you show up for twelve things. It usually just muddies what you show up for at all.
The fields almost everybody skips
Services. This is a list you build yourself, and each item can carry its own short description. This is where trade language belongs. People do not search for "plumbing services." They search for sump pump replacement, hydro jetting, sewer scope, panel upgrade, mini split install, gutter guards. Write the words a customer would type at eleven at night with water on the floor.
The business description. It is a long field and most people put two sentences in it. Use it to say what you do, where, and who you are. Skip the adjectives. "Family owned since" plus a year beats "quality workmanship" every time.
Opening date. Small field, easy to fill, and it is one of the few places on the profile where being twenty years old shows up as a fact rather than a boast.
Booking or appointment link. If you have any way for someone to request a time online, put it here. It turns a listing into a button.
Attributes. Veteran owned, women owned, online estimates, language spoken. These are checkboxes and they take a minute.
Photos with real dates. Job site photos beat stock. A clean install, a finished panel, the truck. Add new ones now and then rather than dumping forty in one afternoon and never touching it again.
What to leave blank or turn off
If you are not going to answer chat messages the same day, think hard before turning messaging on. Google's own help pages describe chat being disabled for profiles that leave messages sitting, and those policies change, so read the current version before you flip it. A channel nobody is watching is worse than no channel.
Same logic with hours. Listing yourself as open until nine when the phone rolls to voicemail at five thirty is a promise you are breaking every single evening. Either list the hours a person can actually help, or make sure something answers.
And add special hours around holidays. It is the one field that goes stale without anyone noticing.
The number you put on the profile
Put the number that actually gets answered. Not the old office line, not a number that forwards twice before it rings.
We made a related decision here on the blog that is worth stealing. We do not print our demo phone number in posts like this one. A phone number sitting in a public feed collects spam callers, and a link is the only version we can actually measure. On a Google Business post, we do include tap to call, because the person reading it already searched for us by name and is holding a phone.
That is the rule worth borrowing: put the number where somebody has already decided to call you, and put a link everywhere else.
Then go back in ninety days
A profile is not a form you submit. Service areas shrink when you drop a county. Services grow when you add a trade. Somebody will suggest an edit to your hours and Google will sometimes accept it. Put a recurring reminder on the calendar and spend ten minutes.