Most Ann Arbor businesses we look at have a Google Business Profile that was claimed once, filled in quickly, and never revisited. It is not broken. It is just leaving the majority of its potential on the table, usually because of three or four settings nobody knew mattered.
Profile optimisation is the correction of those settings. It is the first work we do for almost every client, because it is cheap, fast to show results, and pointless to skip — there is no sense driving traffic toward a profile that is not competitive.
The primary category decides more than anything else on the profile
If you change one thing, change this. Your primary category is the single strongest relevance signal on the profile, and it is frequently wrong.
The usual failure is choosing a category that describes the business accurately in your own language rather than in the language customers search. A company that thinks of itself as a “home improvement contractor” may be invisible for the searches that actually produce work, because customers are typing something narrower and Google is matching against a different category entirely.
Getting this right requires looking outward, not inward. Which category are the three businesses currently ranking above you using? What are people in Saline actually typing? A category that produces fewer, better-matched impressions beats a broad one that produces many irrelevant ones.
Secondary categories then extend coverage — but only into services you genuinely provide. Adding categories for work you do not do is both a guidelines problem and a practical one, because it produces enquiries you have to turn down.
Services and their descriptions are underused
Beneath categories sit services, and this is where most profiles are close to empty. Google lets you list individual services with descriptions, and most businesses either leave the defaults or list three items.
Every service you genuinely offer should be listed, named the way customers describe it rather than the way your trade does, and described in a sentence or two. This is one of the few places on the profile where you control the text directly, and it costs nothing but time.
There is a useful side effect: the exercise of listing every service properly usually reveals which ones deserve their own page on the website. The profile and the site should mirror each other, which is the structural principle behind everything in the map pack and local search work we do.
Service areas, and why the address decision matters
Businesses that travel to customers should be configured as service-area businesses, and Google’s guidelines for representing your business are explicit that a service-area business should hide its address — the example given is a plumber operating from a residential address.
Getting this wrong causes real problems. A visible residential address invites suspension risk and puts a pin somewhere that misrepresents where you work. Hiding it when you actually have a storefront customers visit loses you the proximity advantage you have earned.
The service areas themselves should reflect where you will genuinely drive. Listing every town in three counties does not extend your reach; it dilutes relevance and generates enquiries you decline. In Washtenaw County the honest boundary is often narrower than owners expect, and drive time matters more than distance — Dexter and Whitmore Lake are similar distances from downtown Ann Arbor and are not similar drives on a football Saturday.
Photos, posts and the signals that say “this business is open”
Google shows three results. A person picks one. What they are actually judging in that moment is whether the business looks real and active.
Recent photographs of genuine work do that. Stock imagery does the opposite once anyone looks closely. So does an empty photo tab, or a set of pictures uploaded four years ago. We help clients build a simple habit — a handful of job photos a month, taken on a phone, uploaded without ceremony — because consistency matters more than production quality here.
Posts work similarly. They are not a documented ranking factor, but a profile with recent activity presents better than a dormant one, and the ongoing rhythm of that work sits under ongoing Business Profile management rather than the one-off optimisation described here.
What optimisation looks like as a piece of work
We start with a geo-grid scan so there is a before picture rather than an impression. That shows where you currently rank across the service area, which is almost always different from where you rank when you search from your own office.
Then we audit the profile against Google’s published guidelines and against the profiles currently outranking you: categories, services, service areas, attributes, description, hours, links, photos and review profile. What comes back is a list of specific corrections with reasons, ordered by expected effect.
Most of it we make directly. A few items need decisions only you can make — whether you really want work in Milan, whether a category reflects a service you want more of. Those get flagged rather than assumed.
Then we scan again, four to six weeks later, and compare. If the profile was the constraint, that second scan shows it clearly. If it was not, we have learned something cheaply, and the conversation moves to whether the problem is map pack competition or something on the website.
Where this stops being enough
Optimisation fixes what is wrong on the profile. It does not manufacture prominence. In a competitive category — the kind where six well-run businesses are all fighting for three positions in the same part of Ann Arbor — a correct profile gets you to parity, not ahead.
Past that point, the work becomes reviews, links, content and consistent activity, which is slower and costs more. We will be straight with you about which situation you are in after the first scan, because it changes what the money should be spent on.
Call 734-747-3922 or request a free audit, and we will run the geo-grid before you decide anything.
This sits under the primary category, alongside Internet marketing service work beyond Google Business Profile Optimization.
Before you buy this
These pages answer the questions that usually come up before someone commits. They are written to be useful whether or not you hire us.
- the profile problems we find most often — What are the most common Google Business Profile problems?
Related reading
- Why Your Google Business Profile Is Not Showing Up — Why is my Google Business Profile not showing up?