Five fields get skipped on almost every local profile we audit: services, the description, products, attributes and posts. Between them they decide which searches you are eligible for and what a person sees before they ever reach your website. Filling them takes an afternoon and costs nothing.
The reason they get skipped is that the profile looks finished without them. Name, address, phone, hours, a photo, and the thing goes live and shows up on a map. It feels done. Meanwhile the competitor two towns over has listed thirty individual services and is turning up for searches you never knew existed.
Services: the field that does the most work
Services are individual line items, and each one is a phrase a person might search. A heating company that lists "HVAC" once is one entry. One that lists furnace repair, heat pump installation, ductwork, annual service, emergency no heat calls and oil to gas conversion is six, and each has its own short description you can write.
Write them the way a customer says them, not the way the trade says them. Nobody in a cold house at eleven at night searches for "residential heating remediation". They search for "no heat".
The description: 750 characters nobody uses
You get 750 characters. Most profiles have either nothing or the sentence from the bottom of an email signature. It is not a ranking field in the way the category is, and it is the first thing a person reads when they tap your listing, which makes it a conversion field.
Say what you do, who you do it for, where, and one thing that is actually true and specific about you. Since 2013 and more than 50 local businesses is the sort of line that belongs there for us. A number of years, a service area, a specialty. Not adjectives.
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Get a free website and marketing auditCategories: one primary, up to nine more
The primary category is the single most important setting on the profile because it determines which searches you can appear for at all. Pick the one you most want the phone to ring about, not the one that covers the widest ground.
The additional slots are for services you genuinely deliver. It is tempting to fill all nine. Do not, unless you can actually service every one of them well, because a category is a promise and a bad fit produces calls you will resent taking.
Attributes and hours: small fields, real consequences
Attributes are the checkboxes: wheelchair accessible, appointment required, online estimates, women owned, veteran owned, languages spoken. They surface as filters in Maps and as small labels on your listing, and some of them are the deciding detail for the person reading.
Hours matter more than people think, and holiday hours matter most of all. A profile that says open on a day you are closed produces a wasted trip and a bad review. In a seasonal region that gets worse: plenty of Pocono businesses genuinely run different hours between the summer season and February, and a profile that never reflects that is quietly training people to distrust it.
Posts: the field that signals the business is alive
A short update every week or two. A job you just finished, a seasonal reminder, a service you are booking for now, an answer to a question you get asked constantly.
The individual post is not doing much. The pattern is. A profile that has been updated this month reads as an operating business and a profile last touched two years ago reads as a maybe, and in a category where three businesses look otherwise identical to the person searching, being visibly active is a real tiebreaker. It also gives you somewhere to put the seasonal message that has no natural home on the website.
Products, and why a service business should still care
The products section is not just for retailers. Service businesses use it for packages: an annual maintenance plan, a tune up, an inspection, a starter engagement. Each one gets a name, a short description and optionally a price, and it appears in the listing where people are already looking.
For anyone nervous about publishing prices, a starting price with a plain caveat is more useful than nothing and it screens out the calls that were never going to convert.
What I would skip
Two things. Do not bother with the profile website builder, which Google turned off in March 2024 anyway and which left a lot of small businesses with no site the day it went. And do not spend much time on the questions and answers section beyond seeding a few real questions, because it is unmoderated and you cannot control what appears there.
One more thing worth doing while you are in there: check that the business name field holds your actual registered trading name and nothing else. Adding a service or a town to the name is against Google guidelines, competitors report it, and a suspended profile takes far longer to get back than the shortcut was ever worth. We have watched a business lose its listing over three extra words in the name field during its busiest month.
The order I would work in: primary category, services, description, hours including holidays, photos of real work, then a posting habit you can actually keep. An hour two weeks beats a heroic Saturday followed by eighteen months of silence.
If you want us to look at yours and tell you what is missing, that is part of the local search work we do, and it sits inside the Growth Engine for clients on a plan. Both are priced on the pricing page, and if you would rather do it yourself with a list in hand, ask us for the list.