Google Business Profile
The real checklist — categories, photos, reviews, Q&A, and the mistakes that quietly cost you visibility.
Read the guideGuides
Most local businesses already have Google Business Profile and Search Console set up, most built a website without knowing what platform they're actually on, and most have never checked what it looks like on a phone. These are the real guides, not a teaser for a sales call.
The Google world
Google Business Profile (Maps and the local pack), organic Search (your actual website), and now AI Overviews pulling from both to answer a search before anyone clicks a link. Google itself says it sees more than 5 trillion searches a year. None of it happens automatically — a site built on Squarespace, Wix, or anywhere else doesn't rank just because it exists.
It's not just the shop down the street. Directory sites like Thumbtack, Angi, and HomeAdvisor already rank well for the exact same searches — a business's own site is competing with them too, in Google, in AI Overviews, and everywhere in between.
For a Business Profile, Google publishes exactly what decides local ranking: relevance, distance, and prominence. For your actual website, Google's own quality rater guidelines reward E-E-A-T — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. The "Experience" part matters most here: Google explicitly rewards someone who's actually done the work over a page that just describes it — the same reasoning behind using tools like Gauge for the AI-answer-engine side of Sonshine's relaunch, not just traditional SEO.
This isn't abstract, and it isn't instant. Even Sonshine Glass — the real client behind the $93K signed contract covered elsewhere on this site — doesn't have every page indexed yet; getting a full site indexed and ranked is ongoing work, not a switch you flip once. But the pages that are indexed are the ones doing the work.
Google, Angi, and Thumbtack aren't the same kind of thing, for either side of the transaction.
| Angi | Thumbtack | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| For the consumer | Free — search, compare, and contact a business directly | Free to browse and request quotes | Free — submit a request, compare quotes |
| For the business | No fee to appear or rank organically | Pay to advertise and appear in search | Pay per lead, whether or not it closes |
| Who else gets the lead | No one — it's a direct call or form fill to you | Typically sold to 3–5 pros at once | Typically sold to multiple pros at once |
| What you're really buying | Visibility you keep building on, indefinitely | Visibility rented for as long as you keep paying | A shot at a lead other pros already have too |
None of this works in isolation. A customer who can't reach anyone, or never hears back after asking for a quote, doesn't just go quiet — they sometimes leave a review that says exactly that. Reviews are a real, published Google ranking factor, folded into what Google calls prominence and trustworthiness. A bad experience doesn't just cost the one job in front of you — it can quietly work against the visibility that's supposed to bring the next ten.
The real checklist — categories, photos, reviews, Q&A, and the mistakes that quietly cost you visibility.
Read the guideHow to actually read it — indexing errors, what's ranking, what's broken, and what to fix first.
Read the guideWhat Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, and GoHighLevel actually are — and what that means for ranking and control.
Read the guideWhy your site can genuinely look different by device — and why Google mostly only judges one of them.
Read the guideWhere it genuinely removes friction for a trade business, and where a person is still the right call.
Read the guideThe paid diagnostic covers your Google Business Profile, your search visibility, and your phones — plus a real page-by-page strategy for what to fix first.