The primary category
The single biggest lever on the listing, and the one most often set to something vague years ago and never looked at since. It decides which searches you are eligible to appear in at all. Getting it wrong is not a small mistake.
▲ Service
Local SEO & Google Business Profile
For most local trades the Google listing is the shop window and the website is the thing behind it. Getting the listing right is usually the higher-value half hour, and it is the half hour almost nobody spends.
01 Where your customers actually are
Most people looking for a local trade never reach the website at all.
Somebody stands in their kitchen with a leak, or in a car park with a warning light on, and types “plumber near me” or “garage near me” into a phone. What comes back first is a map with three businesses on it.
Everything they need to act is inside that panel: the name, how far away you are, whether you are open now, the phone number, the directions, the reviews. Plenty of them tap Call without ever visiting a website. The listing is not a signpost pointing at your site — for that customer it is your business.
Which is why a rebuilt website and a neglected listing is the wrong way round. The listing is where the decision gets made; the site is where it gets confirmed. Both have to be right, and if only one of them can be, it should be the listing.
What is in the panel before anyone clicks
- Your business name, and how far away you are
- Open, closed, or closing soon
- A call button
- Directions
- Star rating and reviews
- The category you are filed under
- A link to your website, if the link is any good
Every one of those is something you control, and every one of them can be wrong without anybody telling you.
02 Getting the listing right
The work is unglamorous and it is mostly fixing things that are quietly wrong.
Additional categories
Chosen for what you genuinely do rather than everything that sounds useful. Padding the list with work you do not take on brings you the wrong calls, which costs you time and eventually costs you a review.
Services and description
The list of what you actually offer, written in the words customers use rather than trade shorthand, plus a description that reads like a person wrote it. Both are fields most listings leave empty.
Hours, including the awkward ones
Regular hours, and the special hours for bank holidays and the fortnight at Christmas. “Open” on a listing when the shutters are down is the cheapest possible way to annoy somebody.
Address, or service area
A trade that travels to the customer is set up differently to one people come to. Getting that distinction right changes where you show up, and it is a common source of a listing that seems invisible for no obvious reason.
The website link
Pointed at a page that works on a phone, loads quickly, and repeats the details in the listing. A link to a page that fails on a phone spends your listing's credibility rather than adding to it.
03 Listing and website in agreement
The listing and the site have to tell the same story, down to the punctuation.
Name, address and phone number are the three that matter most, and they need to match — not roughly, but exactly.
It is remarkably easy for them to drift apart. The listing says Smith & Sons Ltd, the website header says Smith and Sons, and the invoice template says something else again. The phone number on the site is the old landline. The address on the listing has a unit number that the website has dropped. None of that was a decision anybody made; it accumulated.
Sorting it out is dull and it is worth doing. It is also the part where having the website and the listing looked at by the same person actually helps — the two get made to agree instead of being handled by two people who never speak.
Where I have built the site, the details on it come from what you told me, so agreement is the default rather than an afterthought.
Checked against each other
- Business name, including whether “Ltd” is on it
- Address, in the same form on both, unit numbers and all
- Phone number, in one format, with no retired numbers left lying about
- Opening hours
- What you say you do, so the services on the listing appear on the site too
- Structured business details in the page itself, so a search engine reading the site sees the same facts as the listing
04 What I will not tell you
Nobody can sell you a position in Google's results.
Anyone who offers you one is either guessing or lying, and the monthly retainer built on that promise is the oldest trick in this trade.
What is genuinely within anybody's control is narrower and duller than that: making sure nothing on your listing is missing, wrong, or contradicting your website. That is the work. Whether it moves you up the map is Google's decision, made with information neither of us can see.
So there are no rankings quoted on this page, no traffic figures, and no before-and-after screenshots. There is no monthly retainer either — this is a job with an end, not a subscription.
The experience behind it
I have worked in search and affiliate marketing for twenty-five years. That is long enough to have watched several confident theories about how ranking works turn out to be wrong, which is exactly why you will not find a promise on this page.
Albek Marketing Ltd itself is new, and the about page is blunt about what that does and does not mean.
05 What it costs
Priced by email, once I have looked at your listing.
There is no published figure for this one, and inventing one would be no use to you. A listing that needs a category corrected and the hours filled in is an afternoon. One with three duplicate entries, a wrong address and a decade of neglect is not.
Send me your business name and rough location and I will look at what is actually there before quoting. If the honest answer is “this is twenty minutes of work you could do yourself”, that is what you will get told, and I will tell you which fields to change.
If you are having the website done as well, say so — doing both together is less work than doing them separately, and it is the only way the two end up genuinely agreeing.
Useful to include
- Your business name as it appears on the listing
- The town, so I am looking at the right one
- Your website address, if there is one
- Whether you can still log into the profile, or whether that went with a former employee
That last one is more common than you would think, and it is fixable.