Setting up a Google Business Profile when you haven't got a shopfront

Every guide to getting work as a tradesperson tells you to sort out your Google listing. Ours does too, in about four different places.

None of them tell you how. So here it is: the setup, the bit everybody gets stuck on, the rules that quietly risk your listing, and the parts that genuinely don't matter.

If you're weighing this against paying for a website, read this first — a fair amount of what people want a site for, this does free.

First, where it actually lives

It's called a Google Business Profile. There's no separate app to download any more, and if you go looking for one you'll waste an evening.

You manage it from Google Search or Google Maps, signed into the account that owns it. Search your own business name while signed in and the management view appears above the results. That's it — that's the admin panel. There's a business.google.com manager as well, but it's built for people running lots of listings at once, which isn't you.

Setting up without a shopfront

This is the bit that stops people before they start: every screen seems to want a business address, and yours is your house.

Google's eligibility rule is that you qualify if customers can come to you or if you go to them. A trade obviously does the second, and the setting for it is a service-area business. Choose that and you can hide the address entirely — the profile shows the areas you cover instead of where you live. What you can't do is invent an address to sidestep it: PO boxes and virtual offices are explicitly not accepted, and using one is a good way to lose the listing later.

Then there's the thing almost everybody gets wrong.

Your service area is not a radius. You can't tell Google "twenty miles around Falkirk". Google's guidance says so directly: you specify the area by city, town or postcode. You get up to twenty of them, and the total shouldn't stretch beyond roughly two hours' driving from your base.

So list the places you actually work and would happily drive to on a wet Tuesday. Not every town within a hopeful hour — an area you'd turn down is an area you shouldn't be listed in, because the enquiry still comes and you still have to deal with it.

Verification, where everyone stalls

You don't get to choose how you're verified. Google decides based on your business type, region and what it already knows about you, and the options can't be changed. For a service-area trade it's very often video.

Video verification means one continuous recording, filmed live on your phone, at least thirty seconds, no edits and no cuts. Google's requirements differ by business type, and the service-area version is the one that applies to you. It asks for three things:

• Where you operate — street signs, nearby landmarks or other identifiers. If you work from home, Google says you can film landmarks and signs in your immediate neighbourhood.
• That the business exists — the professional tools, equipment or products you use for work. Specialist kit, your workspace, business cards or branded workwear all count.
• That you run it — yourself doing the work, or getting into something only the business has, like unlocking a van with your branding on it. A business document such as an invoice, permit or utility bill in the business name also counts.

No shopfront or permanent signage is needed. That belongs to the storefront version of the rules, and it's where a lot of the "I can't verify without premises" worry comes from.

So the filming that works is roughly: the street sign at the end of your road and a pan across a couple of recognisable local buildings, the van with the business name on it, your tools and branded gear, then one document in the business name. One take, talking through it as you go, no stopping.

Cover anything private before you film. Google's rules bar bank account, tax and ID numbers, private information about you or anyone else, and other people's faces. If you show an invoice, cover the customer's name and address, your bank details and any tax reference — the business name is the only part that needs to be readable.

Timings, so you know when to worry: Google says a verification review can take up to five working days. If you're sent a postcard instead, most codes arrive inside fourteen days, and every code expires after thirty.

If a video is rejected, Google tells you why and you can re-record and resubmit. Check the new take against the three things above before you send it.

What to fill in, and what to ignore

Once you're verified, there's a long list of fields and most of them are worth about five minutes each. The ones that earn their time:

The primary category. Pick the one that genuinely describes the work, not the most impressive-sounding one. Additional categories exist for real extra services, and Google's own guidance says not to add a category for every single thing you do. (You'll read elsewhere that the primary category is the biggest ranking factor there is. That's an SEO-industry view from practitioner surveys, not something Google says — treat it as informed opinion.)

Services. You can add custom ones for anything not on Google's list, which for most trades you'll need. Two rules: no prices and no phone numbers in the service names, or they're rejected automatically.

The description. 750 characters, no links, no HTML. Write what you do and where, plainly.

Photos. Of your own work, not stock. Google's photo guidance suggests at least three "photos at work" that represent the services you offer, alongside its technical requirements. What it doesn't do is promise a quantified uplift. The often-quoted "42% more direction requests" figure comes from a Google study back in 2014, and Google no longer publishes it. So take good photos because a homeowner deciding between two profiles will look at them, not because a number on a marketing blog says so.

Updates. Short posts about recent jobs. They archive after six months unless you set a date range. Genuinely optional, and if you're going to abandon it after two, skip it.

Questions and answers. This part has changed. Google retired the Q&A API in November 2025 and has been reworking how questions appear on profiles, and its own help pages haven't all caught up. If your profile still shows questions from customers, answer them — it takes a minute. Just don't build anything around the feature while it's this obviously in flux.

The review rules that actually risk your listing

Reviews are the part that matters most and the part where people casually break policy without realising.

Asking is fine. Google explicitly permits it, including sending a link or a QR code. Anyone telling you that asking is against the rules has it wrong.

Offering anything in return is not. Payment, a discount, money off the next job, a free extra — all banned, in Google's own words, and that includes offering something to get a bad review taken down.

Asking only your happy customers is not, either. This one surprises people, because it feels like common sense. Google's contribution policy names it directly: selectively soliciting positive reviews, or discouraging negative ones, is a breach. If you've ever thought about sending the link to the good jobs and skipping the awkward one, that's the thing it's describing. Ask everyone, the same way, every time.

Reviews from people connected to you don't count — employees, former employees, anyone in a contractual relationship with you. Your mate who you subbie for is not a reviewer.

Replying is worth doing, and needs the profile verified first. Your reply shows publicly under the review, under the business name rather than your personal name.

A bad review can be reported, but only on policy grounds, and you get one appeal if it's refused. Assessment takes several days. Google's own guidance is worth taking seriously here: don't report a review just because you disagree with it. A measured public reply to a harsh review does more for the next person reading than getting it removed would.

On getting the first ones: they're much harder than the ones after, and the mechanics of asking at the right moment are covered in getting your first customers with no reviews rather than repeated here.

What actually moves you up

Google publishes three factors and keeps the rest confidential.

Relevance — how well your profile matches what was typed. Distance — how far you are from the person searching, which you cannot do anything about. Prominence — how well known the business is, which Google says draws on how many sites link to you and how many reviews you have.

That's the published list. Everything beyond it is inference, including most of what you'll read.

The one thing Google states flatly: there is no way to request or pay for a better position in the local results.

It's also worth being honest that the widely-repeated statistics here don't hold up. "A complete profile gets seven times more clicks" traces back to marketing agencies who sell profile management, with no primary source behind it. The only trustworthy numbers about your listing are the ones in your own performance panel, which shows what people searched to find you and what they did next. Check that after a couple of months rather than trusting anyone's benchmark.

The part nobody mentions: you're a tenant

A Business Profile is the closest thing to a free source of work that a trade has, and it compounds. But be honest with yourself about what you're standing on.

Anyone signed into Google can suggest an edit to your listing — your name, your hours, your location — and Google reviews those without any documented step where you get to approve or veto them. You find out afterwards.

Profiles get suspended, and Google doesn't publish what triggers it or how long an appeal takes. The appeal wants documentary evidence uploaded within a sixty-minute window.

And features vanish. Google's own chat and call history were switched off in July 2024. The Q&A API went in November 2025. The "Google Guaranteed" badge and its money-back promise were discontinued too, replaced by a plainer "Google Verified" badge — and worth knowing if you're considering paid Local Services Ads, the UK screening covers company registration, licences and insurance, but the background checks that US marketing talks about apply to the US and Canada, not here.

None of that is a reason to skip it. It's a reason not to build your entire business on it — which is the same argument as where UK trades actually get leads makes about every source you don't own outright.

The order that works

1. Create the profile as a service-area business and hide your address.
2. Set your service areas by town or postcode — the places you'd actually drive to.
3. Get verified. Assume video. Film it in one take: street signs, the van, your tools, the business name on paperwork.
4. Fill in the primary category, your services and the description. Half an hour, once.
5. Add photos of real jobs, and add a few more whenever you finish something worth showing.
6. Ask every customer for a review, the same way, at the moment the job is done and they're pleased.
7. Check the performance panel after a couple of months and see what people actually searched.

Steps 1 to 5 are one evening. Step 6 is the whole thing, and it never finishes.

That last one is the only part where software helps at all: reviews come from finished jobs, and asking reliably means knowing which jobs finished this week and who they were for. grafter.ly tracks that, along with the quoting and invoicing either side of it. It does not manage your Google listing, and nothing here needs it — you can try it free for 30 days, no card to start, or set the profile up tonight for nothing and be better off either way.

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Sources. Google Business Profile Help on eligibility, service areas, verification methods and timings, video verification, categories, services, the business description, photos, updates, local ranking, replying to reviews, reporting reviews, suspension appeals and the end of chat and call history; Google Search Help on suggesting edits; Google's prohibited and restricted content policy on reviews; Local Services Ads Help on the Google Verified badge and UK screening. All checked 10 September 2026. Google changes this product often and has removed several features in the last two years, so re-check anything critical against its own help pages rather than a blog — including this one.