What Is a Google Business Profile?

Your Google Business Profile is the panel that appears beside the search results when somebody searches your company by name, and the pin that appears on Maps when somebody searches your trade near them. It is free, you own it, and for most home service businesses it is the single most valuable piece of marketing property they have.

It holds your hours, your service area, your phone number, your photos, your reviews and the answers to questions people have asked about you. Google’s own help pages are the authority on what a profile may and may not carry. It also holds posts, which is the part almost nobody uses.

Why it matters more for a contractor than a website

A homeowner with no heat is not reading your website. They are searching, looking at three results, and picking one. What they see in that moment is the profile: how many reviews, how recent, what the photos look like, and whether the business looks like it is still operating.

A profile that has not been touched since last year still shows your reviews. What it does not show is any sign that you are working this week.

What to do about it

Claim it if you have not. Then keep it alive: publish a post regularly, add photos from real jobs, and answer the questions people leave on it. That is the whole job, and it is the one nobody has time for. If yours has been quiet for a while, here is what that costs.

That is the part PostIQ does. If you are already buying Local Services Ads, note that they appear on the same page as the profile you are not maintaining.

The bottom line

Claim it, then keep it alive. Reviews are the part you cannot control and posts are the part you can, which makes the posting the only real decision here. If yours has been quiet since last year, that is not a small gap — it is the thing a homeowner is reading instead of your website.