Your Google Business Profile hasn't posted in eight months. Here's what that costs.

Go and look at your own profile. Search your company name on a phone, tap through, and scroll to the posts. If you have never signed into it, it is claimed from Google’s own page for the product.

If the most recent one is from last spring, you are in the majority, and you are also leaving the most valuable thing you own online sitting still.

What a homeowner is actually doing

Somebody’s furnace stops at nine at night. They search, they get three businesses, and they pick one in about forty seconds. What they use to pick is not your website. It is the panel: the star rating, the review count, the photos, and whether the whole thing looks like a business that is currently operating.

Your reviews are doing their job. Nine hundred of them, most of them good, built over fifteen years. That is the asset.

The problem is that reviews are history. A profile with nine hundred reviews and no post since March tells a homeowner that you were busy once. A profile with a photo from a job you finished on Tuesday tells them you are busy now, and that when they call, somebody will answer.

What a Google Business Profile post is, and is not

A post on the profile is a short update with a photo. It appears to the person who has already found you and is deciding. Nobody follows it and nobody scrolls a feed of them, so the rules of social media do not apply.

That also means the bar is low. It does not have to be clever. It has to be recent, real, and specific: a heat pump you swapped in this week, a note that you answer the phone on weekends, the panel upgrade with the van in the frame.

What does not work is the slogan. “Quality workmanship, family owned since 1994” is on every profile in the list, including the two you are being compared against — and a claim you cannot support is a problem in its own right, which is what the FTC’s advertising guidance is about.

The cost, stated honestly

Nobody can tell you what a dormant profile costs your business in dollars, and anybody who gives you a number for it is guessing. What can be said is narrower and more useful:

• Profile views, call clicks and direction requests are numbers Google reports to you already, for free, and you can read them today.
• Those numbers respond to activity on the profile, on a scale of sixty to ninety days, not days.
• Almost none of your competitors are posting either, which means this is an open lane rather than a race you are behind in. If you are already buying Local Services Ads, you are paying to be seen and then handing the decision to a page nobody maintains.

So the honest version is: you have an asset that is running at a fraction of what it could, the instrumentation to see whether that changes is already in your account, and the fix is a weekly habit that nobody in a busy shop has ever managed to keep.

What to do this week

Three things, in order:

1. Check your last post date. That is your baseline, and it is probably worse than you expect.
2. Write down today’s profile views, call clicks and direction requests. Ninety days from now that number is the only honest way to judge any of this.
3. Post something. A photo from a job this week and two sentences about it. If you are not sure what, the photos are almost certainly already in your job management software.

Then do it again next week, and the week after, in the middle of a season when you are running four trucks and the phone will not stop.

That last part is where this falls down for everyone, which is what PostIQ exists to fix: we pull the photos your crew already uploaded, build the post, and publish it, and you get a text before it goes out.