The twenty-minute Google Business Profile most owners never finish
The free listing that two thirds of your customers see first usually has last year’s hours, three photos, and no services. Here is the short version of fixing it.
If you only fix one thing this month, fix this. The Google Business Profile is the card people see on the map and in AI answers, and for most service businesses it is the single most viewed page they have. It is also the one most owners set up once, years ago, and never touched again.
The twenty minutes
- Claim and verify it if you have not. Google will mail a postcard or ask for a short video of the truck and the tools.
- Pick the primary category that matches what you want more of. “Lawn care service” and “Landscaper” pull different searches.
- Add every service you do as its own line, with one plain sentence each. This is the text assistants quote.
- Set the service area to the towns you actually drive to, not the whole state.
- Upload ten real photos: the truck, the crew, five finished jobs, a before and after.
- Turn on messaging and put the number that actually gets answered.
The five minutes a week
Post one finished job with a photo and two sentences. Reply to any new review in your own words. That is the whole maintenance plan, and it is the part that separates a profile that ranks from one that sits.
If the five minutes keep not happening, that is not a discipline problem. It is a logistics problem, and it is what Protocol is for.