It’s Tuesday morning. You search your trade plus your suburb on your phone. Three competitors sit in the map pack with 80+ reviews each. Your profile is on page two, half-finished, last updated when you set it up in 2022. Two of those competitors are newer than you. One is, frankly, not as good at the actual work. But they own the top of the page, and they’re getting the calls.
Google Business Profile (still called GMB by half the industry) is the single biggest free lead source available to a tradie in 2026. It’s also the one most established trade businesses have set up badly and never touched again. Here’s the exact checklist to fix that this week.
Why the map pack decides who gets called
When someone searches “electrician near me” or “plumber [suburb]” on a phone, the map pack (those top 3 local results with the map) takes up the entire first screen. Google’s own studies have shown 76% of people who do a local search on their phone visit a business within 24 hours, and 28% of those searches result in a purchase. Translation: the map pack converts harder than almost anything else online.
The three slots are decided by Google’s local algorithm, which weighs three things: relevance (does your profile match the search), distance (how close are you to the searcher), and prominence (how established and trusted are you, measured mostly through reviews and citations).
You can’t change distance. You can absolutely move the other two.
The 2026 setup checklist
Business name: use your real registered name, no keyword stuffing
Your business name on Google must match your ABN registration or your shopfront signage. “Peter’s Electrical” is fine. “Peter’s Electrical Sydney Emergency 24/7 Cheap” is a guideline violation and will get you suspended. Google has been aggressive about this since 2024, with suspension turnaround now sitting at 3 to 6 weeks if you appeal.
If your competitors are getting away with it, you can report them through the Business Redressal Form. Google actions roughly 60% of those reports within 14 days.
Primary category: the single most important choice on the profile
Your primary category does more for what searches you appear in than any other field. Pick the one that matches the bulk of your work, not the broadest. An electrician doing 80% residential should pick “Electrician,” not “Electrical supply store” or “Commercial electrician.”
Add 2 to 4 secondary categories that cover your actual services. Don’t add categories you don’t offer just to capture searches: Google’s spam detection has gotten significantly better, and irrelevant categories can drop your prominence score.
Service areas: list real suburbs, not your whole metro
Set up as a service-area business if you travel to customers. List up to 20 suburbs or postcodes you genuinely service. Listing all of greater Sydney when you actually only work the inner west signals low relevance to Google, and your rankings will reflect that.
A 2024 BrightLocal study found service-area businesses that limited their list to 10 to 15 specific suburbs ranked an average of 2.3 positions higher than those that listed 20+ broad areas.
Services: list every job type with prices where possible
The Services section is one of the most underused fields. List every job type you offer (e.g. “Switchboard upgrades”, “Solar inverter installation”, “Smoke alarm replacement”). Add a description and a price or price range for each one.
Profiles with prices listed get 18% more click-throughs to the website according to internal Google studies referenced in their 2024 local search documentation. Vague pricing isn’t a competitive advantage anymore. Homeowners are filtering by it.
Photos: 30 minimum, real job sites only
The minimum to be taken seriously in 2026 is 30 photos. Real job photos. Before-and-afters. Your team on site. Your van. The completed work. Stock photos are obvious and Google’s image recognition can flag them.
Set a recurring 5-minute slot every Friday to upload 3 to 5 new photos from that week’s jobs. Profiles that upload weekly get 35% more discovery searches than profiles that upload monthly (BrightLocal 2024 Local Consumer Review Survey).
Reviews: the single highest-leverage lever you have
Reviews are the biggest prominence signal Google uses. The 2024 Whitespark Local Search Ranking Factors survey put review quantity and velocity in the top 5 ranking factors for local pack rankings. The numbers most established tradies need to be aware of:
- The average top-3 ranked tradie in metro Australia has 87 reviews
- The average rating in the top 3 is 4.7 stars or higher
- Profiles that add a new review every 7 days hold their position 2.4x longer than profiles that go a month between reviews
The single highest-converting moment for asking is within 2 hours of finishing the job. Send a text with a direct review link (not the long Google Maps URL: generate a short link inside your Business Profile dashboard). Mention the customer’s name and one specific thing about the job.
Q&A: seed it yourself
The Questions & Answers section is editable by anyone, including competitors and random homeowners. Seed it with 5 to 10 questions you actually get asked, then answer them from your business account. This stops a random someone from posting a misleading question and tanking your conversion rate.
Common ones to pre-load: “Do you offer after-hours emergency callouts?”, “What suburbs do you cover?”, “Are you licensed and insured?”, “Do you charge a callout fee?”
Posts and updates: weekly, 2 minutes each
Google Posts show up directly in your profile and refresh prominence signals. Aim for one post a week. Recent job, a seasonal reminder, a service you want to push. Keep it under 100 words with one photo.
Posts older than 7 days get deprioritised in the display. If you can’t commit to weekly, don’t bother starting.
Messaging: turn it on, respond within 30 minutes
Turn on the Messaging feature in your profile. Google now shows a response time publicly, and businesses that respond within 30 minutes convert messaging leads at 3x the rate of those who respond in 24 hours.
If you can’t realistically reply within 30 minutes during business hours, don’t turn it on. A slow response time displayed publicly is worse than no messaging at all.
Website link: send it to a page that converts
The default behaviour is to link to your homepage. Better: link to a dedicated landing page that matches what you want the customer to do (book a quote, call now, request a callback). Track the link with a UTM parameter (e.g. ?utm_source=gmb&utm_medium=organic) so you actually know what GBP is sending you.
What to do this week
- Audit your profile against this checklist. Open your GBP dashboard, screenshot the current state, and mark every field that’s incomplete or stale. Most established tradies have 6 to 10 gaps.
- Fix the three highest-leverage items first: primary category, service areas (trim if over 15), and add 10 new real job photos. That’s roughly 45 minutes of work.
- Set up the 2-hour SMS review request. Write the message template today, save it in your phone as a shortcut, and start sending it after every job from tomorrow. Aim for 4 reviews this week, 16 in the next 4 weeks.
- Schedule a recurring 15-minute slot on Friday afternoons: upload 3 to 5 photos from the week, write one Google Post, answer any new Q&A. That’s the maintenance routine that keeps the profile compounding.
GBP isn’t a set-and-forget asset. It’s a weekly habit, and the tradies winning the map pack in 2026 are the ones treating it that way. The other 90% of your competitors won’t, which is exactly why this works.
Rigup runs the GBP optimisation and the lead engine for you once you’re ready to scale. $999 to start, $299/mo from go-live, 5 leads a month or that month is refunded. Get started, see what’s included, or book a call to chat through your area.