A handyman we work with, Better Call Mike, had a Google Business Profile the way most contractors do: it existed, technically. We set it up properly. Here is month one.
| People who saw the profile | 157 |
|---|---|
| Interactions | 66 |
| Phone calls | 12 |
| Texts | 2 |
| WhatsApp messages | 4 |
| Clicks to his website | 24 |
Cost: nothing. Google does not charge for this.
157 views is not a lot. That is the point.
A website might get thousands of visits and convert one or two percent of them. Mike's profile was seen 157 times and 18 of those people contacted him directly — call, text or WhatsApp. That is 11.5%.
The traffic is small because the audience is narrow: people in his area, typing something like handyman near me, right now, because something is broken. Almost nobody browses Google Maps for fun.
For scale, in our last post Mike was paying $28.90 a lead on Thumbtack. Those 18 contacts would have cost him about $520. Month one, from a listing that costs nothing to run.
So why does not everyone do it?
Because it is free in money and expensive in attention. There is no invoice and no account manager chasing you. It is an afternoon of fiddly work and then twenty minutes a month, and it is always the thing that gets postponed until the van needs washing instead.
What actually matters, roughly in order
1. Claim it and get verified
The dull part that stops most people. Google may want a video walkthrough of your van, your tools, your signage. It can take two attempts. Nothing else works until this does.
2. The primary category
The single biggest lever, and the one people get wrong by aspiration — a handyman who also paints picks “Painter” because it sounds like better work, and stops appearing for the searches he actually wins.
There is no lookup table for this. We pick it per client, based on what they are actually hired for most, what is being searched where they work, and what the other profiles ranking locally are using. For Mike it was handyman, because that is what people type when they need him.
3. Address or service area
Most contractors work out of a house and panic about publishing it. Showing a real address generally helps — Google weighs proximity heavily, and a hidden address weakens that. We showed Mike's.
But it is a judgement call, not a rule. Some clients genuinely should not, and the right answer depends on where the work is relative to where they live.
4. Photos of real work
Not stock. Not the logo. The job, the van, the crew, before and after. Profiles with real photographs get picked over profiles without them, and most contractors upload three and never return.
5. Fill in every service
The services list is searchable. “Ceiling fan installation” is a thing people type. If it is not listed, you are not in the answer.
6. Turn on messaging
Mike got 2 texts and 4 WhatsApp messages in month one — six jobs' worth of enquiries from people who did not want to phone a stranger. That is a checkbox most profiles leave switched off.
7. Reviews, forever
The only part that compounds. Everything above is a one-off; this is the bit you keep doing. Ask on the day the job is finished, while they are pleased and standing in front of the work.
What we would skip
Google Posts. They expire after a week, almost nobody reads them, and for a contractor the time is better spent getting one more review.
The honest summary
This is an afternoon of work and twenty minutes a month, and for Mike it returned 18 direct enquiries in the first month without a penny of ad spend. It is the highest-return hour a contractor can spend on marketing, and it is the one most of them never get to.
If you would rather not spend the afternoon, that is something we do. But the instructions above are the whole job — there is nothing hidden in them.
Figures from Better Call Mike's Google Business Profile, published with his permission.