For a lot of local searches your Business Profile does more work than your website does. It is also free, and it is where the most common and most fixable mistakes live. Here is how to set one up properly in this city.
Get the address right, which is harder here
Los Angeles addresses carry more variation than most: unit numbers, suite letters, buildings that front a different street than their address, and strip centers where the mapped pin lands in the middle of a parking lot rather than at your door. Any of those will send customers to the wrong place.
Whatever format you choose, use it identically everywhere. Ste 210 on your profile and Suite 210 on your site is a small inconsistency, and small inconsistencies across the web are one of the things that quietly hold a listing back. Then drag the map pin to your actual entrance, because the automatic placement is frequently wrong.
Storefront or service area, and why it matters
If customers come to you, you are a storefront and your address should be public. If you go to them, you are a service area business, and you should hide the address and list the areas you cover instead. Trades that list a home address as a public storefront are the most common version of this mistake.
Service area businesses should name real communities rather than drawing a huge radius. Sherman Oaks, Studio City, Encino, Van Nuys, Valley Village is more useful and more credible than a 40 mile circle that implies you will drive to Riverside for a service call.
Categories decide which searches you appear in
Your primary category does more than any other single setting. Hair Salon and Barber Shop surface for different searches. Air Conditioning Contractor and HVAC Contractor are not identical. Pick the one that matches your highest value work rather than the broadest one available.
Then add secondary categories for the other things you genuinely do, and leave off the ones you do not. Padding the list with everything adjacent dilutes the profile and tends to bring in calls for work you do not want.
The details Los Angeles businesses get wrong
A handful of fields get skipped constantly, and each one costs something:
- Hours left at default, or holiday hours never set, which produces the worst possible outcome of a customer driving over to a closed door
- No photos of the entrance or the parking, in a city where finding the door is a real obstacle
- Products and services left empty, when it is free text that helps you match more searches
- Attributes skipped, including wheelchair access, parking type, and language spoken
- The listing left unclaimed after a move, so an old address keeps ranking against you
Reviews, briefly and honestly
Ask every satisfied customer, in person or by text, right after the work is done. That is the whole strategy. Do not buy reviews, do not run gated funnels that only route happy customers to Google, and do not offer discounts for them, all of which violate the terms and can cost you the listing.
Reply to the bad ones calmly and factually. Prospective customers read the reply more closely than the complaint, and a measured response to an unfair review does more good than the review did harm.
Keep your site and your profile in agreement
Business name, address format, hours, phone, and categories should be identical on your site and your profile, and your site should carry the same information in text that search engines can read. Agreement between the two is one of the more reliable signals you can control.
We set this up as part of every plan and keep the two in sync whenever something changes, which is one of the more valuable boring things included on the pricing page.
