What people see when they search
Search “plumber” or “AC repair” with the name of your city, on your phone. Before any free listing, you’ll usually scroll past two kinds of ads:
- A block of paid listings with a rating, the number of reviews, years in business, the area served, “Open 24 hours”, and buttons to get a quote, book online or get the phone number. These are Google’s Local Services Ads.
- Text ads that look like regular results with “Sponsored” above them.
Then comes the map with three businesses, the free listings. Each shows the rating, the number of reviews, years in business, the city, the hours, the phone number, and usually one line from a review. On the searches I checked, those lines were almost all about speed: fixed “in under an hour”, help “the same day”.
Google says it ranks the free listings on three things: relevance (how well your profile matches the search), distance, and prominence (how well known you are, which includes your reviews and the websites that link to you). You can’t pay for a better place (opens in a new tab) in them. The big companies in your area may have thousands of reviews, but they don’t own the list: on one AC repair search, a company with 138 reviews sat right next to companies with 582 and 4,400.
Fix these five things first
- Own your profile. Claim and verify it on Google Business Profile. If a former partner or an old marketing company controls it, request ownership: everything else depends on this.
- Set your service area the right way (next section).
- A phone number that gets answered. In this trade, a missed call is usually a lost job: people call the next name on the list.
- Your services, listed one by one.
- Real photos: your truck, your team, and your work.
The free Google checklist goes through the rest, starting with what matters most.
Your service area: where you really go
If customers don’t come to your address, Google wants you to hide it and show a service area instead. Its own example is a plumber who runs the business from home (opens in a new tab): clear the address from the profile.
- You can list up to 20 cities or ZIP codes (opens in a new tab). You can’t draw a circle around your address.
- Google says the whole area shouldn’t reach farther than about two hours of driving from where you’re based.
- List only the places you really go. A service area stretched to look bigger brings calls you’ll turn down, and those callers don’t come back.
- If customers also come to you (a showroom or a counter), you can show the address and a service area together. A mailbox, a virtual office or a shared desk without your sign and staff doesn’t count as an address on Google.
List every service you offer
Google offers a list of services suggested for your trade (opens in a new tab) (its plumbing example is “Install faucet”), and you can add your own. Give each one a short description and, if you can, a starting price.
This matters more than it looks. When I searched “emergency plumber near me”, Google showed a single plumber’s panel instead of a map, and the panel listed that company’s services one by one: repiping, slab leak repair, water line repair, drain cleaning. Those came straight from the profile.
- Use the words customers use: “water heater installation”, “AC not cooling”, “drain cleaning”, “move-out cleaning”.
- Say “home” when it matters. When I asked ChatGPT for “AC repair near me”, it assumed I meant a car and listed auto shops. Write “home AC repair”, “central air” or “HVAC”, and say who you serve (houses, apartments, businesses), so nobody has to guess.
- Group them if you do several trades (plumbing, heating, cooling).
- Don’t put prices or phone numbers in a service’s name: Google rejects them.
Name, category and years in business
- Your name: exactly as it appears on your truck, your invoices and your website. Adding words like “24/7 Emergency Plumber Best Prices” to the name breaks Google’s rules (opens in a new tab) and can get the profile suspended.
- Your main category: the most specific one that fits your main trade. On the searches I checked, businesses used “Plumber”, “HVAC contractor” and the narrower “Air conditioning repair service”. For cleaning or handyman work, pick the closest one the dashboard offers. Add others only for trades you really do.
- Your opening date: add it. Google may use it to show how many years you’ve been in business (opens in a new tab), which appears right under your name in the results.
Hours, emergencies, and Google calling you
- “Open 24 hours” only if someone answers at 2 a.m. It sits right next to competitors who claim it, so a wrong one is noticed fast, usually in a review. If you take emergency calls only for some jobs, say so in your description and on your website.
- Holidays: set special hours (opens in a new tab) ahead of time. Google suggests confirming your hours on public holidays even when they don’t change.
- Google may call you on a customer’s behalf. On some searches, Google now offers to “get prices” or “check appointments” for the customer, then calls or texts businesses (opens in a new tab) to ask about prices and availability. The caller says it’s automated. Answer it like a customer: it is one. If you don’t want these calls, a verified profile can turn them off in Business Profile settings, under “Google automated calls and text messages”. (Not available in Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, Montana and Nebraska.)
- If you can’t answer every call: send missed callers a text right away, so they know you’ll call back.
Photos of real jobs
- Your truck or van, with your name on it.
- Your team, if they’re happy to be in it.
- Before and after: the leak, the new water heater, the clean kitchen.
- One job per photo, taken on your phone in good light.
Use only your own photos, never stock images: people want to see who will come to their house. Google asks for photos that are in focus, well lit, and not heavily filtered (opens in a new tab). Add a few after each week of work.
Reviews: ask after every job
In BrightLocal’s 2026 survey (opens in a new tab) of 1,002 US adults, about local businesses in general:
- 74% look for reviews from the last three months;
- 68% only choose businesses with four stars or more;
- 47% won’t choose a business with fewer than 20 reviews;
- 89% expect the owner to reply, and half are put off by generic copy-and-paste replies.
How to ask. Text your Google review link the same day, while the fix is fresh: “Thanks for having us today. If we did a good job, a short review helps a small business like ours a lot.” Leave a card with a QR code on the counter. Ask every customer, not only the happy ones.
What not to do. No discount on the next visit in exchange for a review, and no asking only the customers you know are pleased: Google’s rules forbid both (opens in a new tab), and the reviews can be removed. Never write reviews for customers. Their own words are what Google shows: a review that says “fixed our AC the same day” is the line the next person reads.
The law says so too. The FTC’s rule on reviews (opens in a new tab), in effect since October 2024, bans fake reviews (including ones written by AI), paying for positive reviews, undisclosed reviews from people who work for you, and threats to get a bad review removed. It also limits owners and managers asking their relatives for reviews. Courts can fine businesses that break it knowingly.
How to reply. Short, personal, about the job. For a bad review: thank them, own what went wrong, say what you’ll do, and offer to call them. Never share a customer’s address or details.
Fake competitors
Some listings in your area may break Google’s rules: names stuffed with keywords, addresses that are empty lots or mailboxes, one company under several names. If you see one, report it (opens in a new tab): on the listing, choose “Suggest an edit”, then “Place is closed or not here”, then “Offensive, harmful, or misleading”. For misleading names, phone numbers or websites, Google also has a Business Redressal Complaint form. Report what’s clearly against the rules, not a competitor you simply don’t like.
Paid listings, and why your free profile still matters
The paid block at the top is Local Services Ads: you pay per lead (a call or a message), not per click. Google is moving these ads into Google Ads (opens in a new tab) in stages from August 2026, and advertisers who pass Google’s screening now show a single “Google Verified” badge (opens in a new tab). The old money-back guarantee has ended.
Whether ads are worth it depends on your margins and how many jobs you can take; this guide doesn’t push you either way. Two facts help the decision: the ads fill in from your Business Profile (name, address, hours), and the free listings sit right under them. A complete profile helps both.
Beyond Google: Yelp, Apple Maps, AI assistants and neighbors
- Yelp, Thumbtack and Angi pages and “Top 10” lists show up on the first page for plumbing and AC searches. Yelp says ChatGPT shows its reviews, ratings, photos and business details (opens in a new tab), and Angi and Thumbtack have announced apps inside ChatGPT. Claim your pages, keep them matching Google, and reply to reviews there too.
- Apple Maps is the maps app on every iPhone. Apple Business Connect (opens in a new tab) is free and lets you control your listing there.
- Neighbors and local news. Reddit threads asking for an AC company and a local newspaper’s “best HVAC companies” list both ranked on the first page. You can’t make anyone recommend you, and you should never post fake recommendations; you can do work people mention, and tell local news about something real, like a free safety check for seniors.
- AI answers. When I asked ChatGPT for an emergency plumber, each company it listed came with a line taken from that company’s own website, cited as the source: “emergency calls and texts accepted around the clock”, “advertises immediate emergency dispatch”, even a discount offer. It then told the customer to ask three questions before hiring: can you come now, what’s the emergency fee, will you give a written estimate. Answer those on your website, and they travel with you. When I told it I meant home HVAC, it listed four companies within a couple of miles, with 956, 138, 36 and 14 reviews, and none of the big firms with thousands. It showed a general price table (“rough budgeting estimates, not quotes”) and offered to compare companies on price, reputation and whether they charge a diagnostic fee. If your fee is on your website, it can compare yours. ChatGPT also shows ads now: under one answer sat an ad from a home-services marketplace. In BrightLocal’s survey, 45% had used ChatGPT or another AI tool to find a local business, up from 6% a year earlier. Nobody can promise what an AI will say about you. What you can do is make sure everything it reads, on Google, Yelp, Apple Maps and your website, is accurate, complete and the same everywhere.
Your website, kept simple
You don’t need a fancy site. You need one that answers the same questions as your profile, on a phone:
- a phone number people can tap to call, at the top of every page;
- straight answers to what customers ask before hiring: whether you take emergency calls (and texts) and when, how fast you can usually come, your service-call or diagnostic fee, and whether you give a written estimate first;
- a page for each main service, with what’s included and how to get a quote;
- the cities you cover, written out, and the same as on Google;
- your licence number if your state licenses your trade, and proof of insurance: customers check;
- your trade and city in the page title, for example “Plumber in San Antonio”.
Only make a page for a city if it says something true about your work there. Copies of the same page with the city name swapped help nobody, and Google’s spam policies (opens in a new tab) call them doorway pages.
What takes an afternoon, and what takes months
In an afternoon: claim your profile, set the service area, list your services, add the opening date, fix hours, upload real photos, and claim Yelp and Apple Business Connect.
Over the following months: a review after every job, a reply to each one, new photos, and being mentioned where your neighbors look. Google takes time to reflect this. It usually takes months, and nobody can honestly guarantee where you’ll rank.