When someone searches "electrician near me", the first thing they see under the ads is the map with three businesses. That's the map pack, and the only thing that gets you into it is your Google Business Profile — not your website, not your ads. It's free. Here's the checklist we run on every client profile, in the order that matters.

Foundations (do once, check quarterly)

  • Claimed and verified, with you as the primary owner — not a previous agency, not a former employee.
  • Exact business name as it appears on your ute and your ABN. Not "Smith Plumbing — Best Plumber Brisbane 24/7". Keyword-stuffed names get suspended.
  • Primary category is your main trade ("Electrician", "Plumber", "Concrete contractor"). Add secondary categories for what else you do, but the primary drives most of the ranking.
  • Service area set to the suburbs or council areas you travel to. If you work from home and don't want the address shown, hide it and use service areas — that's allowed and correct for most tradies.
  • Phone, website and hours correct, and matching what's on your site. If you answer after hours, say so — "open 24 hours" changes who calls at 9pm.
  • Services listed, each with a short description and a price or "from" price where you can. These show in the profile and feed the searches you match.

Weekly (twenty minutes)

  • Ask for reviews after every completed job, and reply to every one that arrives. Count, rating, recency and the words inside reviews all count. See getting Google reviews without buying them.
  • Add three to five photos of this week's jobs — finished work, the ute on site, the team. Real photos, phone quality is fine. Profiles with regular photo uploads get more clicks; it's also proof you're active.
  • Post an update. A finished job, a seasonal note ("booking gutter cleans before the storms"), a licence renewal. Posts expire, so it needs to be a habit, not a one-off.
  • Answer questions. The Q&A section is public and anyone can ask. Seed it with the five questions customers always ask you, and answer them.

Monthly

  • Check the insights: how people found you, what they searched, calls and website clicks from the profile. It's the closest thing to free keyword research you'll get.
  • Check for edits. Google lets the public "suggest edits" and sometimes applies them. Confirm your hours, category and phone haven't been changed.
  • Report fakes and spam competitors. Profiles with keyword-stuffed names or no real address in your area can be reported; it's slow but it works, and it clears your competition.

What moves map-pack ranking

Three things, roughly in order: relevance (category, services, the words in your reviews and posts), distance (from the searcher — which you can't change, except by having real service areas), and prominence (review count and rating, photos, activity, links to your site, mentions of your business elsewhere). A profile that's worked weekly beats a profile that was perfect once and abandoned. It also makes every ad dollar cheaper, because a customer who clicks your ad and then sees a strong profile is more likely to call.

If you'd rather not run it yourself

This is the whole of our Business Profile management service — the weekly and monthly items above, done as a system, with the review asks automated off your job list. But there's nothing in it you can't start on your own tomorrow.