For most service businesses in Texoma, a new customer’s first look at you happens on Google, and it isn’t your website. It’s your Google Business Profile: the listing with your name, stars, photos, hours and a call button that shows up in Maps and in the map pack at the top of local searches. Google Business Profile optimization means making that listing complete, accurate and active. It costs nothing but time.
Plenty of owners set their profile up years ago and haven’t logged in since. That’s the opening. Here’s what we work through with a new client’s profile, roughly in this order.
Why the profile can matter more than your homepage
Search “plumber near me” from a driveway in Denison and Google shows a map with three businesses before any regular results. Those three get most of the attention, and a lot of people call straight from the listing without ever opening a website.
The profile also feeds Google’s AI answers now. When someone asks Google a question about a local business, the answer draws on the profile details, the reviews and the website. A thin profile gives it less to say about you. We cover that side in our post on getting found in AI search.
Google Business Profile optimization starts with the basics
Start with the fields people get wrong most often.
- Use your real business name, exactly as it’s painted on the truck. Tacking “Best AC Repair Sherman” onto it breaks Google’s guidelines and can get the listing suspended.
- The primary category carries the most weight of anything on the profile. Pick the one that matches the work you most want, such as “HVAC contractor” or “Roofing contractor,” over a vague umbrella.
- Add secondary categories only where they honestly apply.
- If you go to your customers, set a service area with the towns you actually cover and hide your home address.
- Regular hours, plus holiday and seasonal hours, so nobody drives up to a locked door.
- Your services, each with a sentence or two of description.
- The business description. You get 750 characters. Say what you do, who you do it for, where, and how long you’ve been at it.
Then check that the phone number and address match your website character for character. Mismatches confuse Google and customers alike.
Photos from real jobs
Customers can spot stock photos, and they scroll right past them. Upload pictures from actual work: the finished deck, the new water heater, your crew, your trucks, a before-and-after of a cleaned-up yard. Add a few every month so the newest photo on the profile isn’t from 2021.
A phone camera is fine. Good daylight and a clean shot matter more than the equipment.
A review routine you’ll actually keep
Reviews move rankings and they move people. The trouble is that most owners ask when they remember, which means hardly ever.
Make it part of finishing the job. When the work is done and the customer is happy, text them your direct review link that same day (the profile’s “Ask for reviews” button gives you the link). A short text sent while they’re still pleased gets far more responses than an email a week later.
It adds up faster than people expect. Cole’s Pest Control, a client of ours in Bossier City, went from 32 Google reviews in late May 2026 to 45 by July, every one of them five stars. Next to competitors, that’s a listing that looks busy and trusted.
Two things to avoid. Don’t offer discounts or freebies in exchange for reviews, and don’t ask only the customers you’re sure loved you. Google’s policies prohibit both.
Reply to every review. Thank the good ones and mention the job. For the bad ones, stay calm, keep it short and offer to sort it out by phone. Future customers read those replies closely. There’s more on this in why online reviews are the new word of mouth.
Post updates now and then
You can publish short updates straight to the profile, a bit like a social post with a photo and a button. A seasonal offer, a finished project, a new town you serve. Every couple of weeks is plenty. Posts won’t carry your rankings by themselves, but a profile with recent activity looks open for business and an empty one looks abandoned.
Two features that are gone
Older advice still tells you to turn on messaging and fill out your Q&A section. Neither exists anymore. Google shut off Business Profile chat on July 31, 2024, and it retired the questions-and-answers section in late 2025, replacing it with AI-generated answers built from your profile, website and reviews.
So the answers to common questions (“Do you take emergency calls?” “Do you come out to Whitesboro?”) need to live in your profile fields, your services list and your website, where Google can find them. And the phone number on the profile has to get answered. Google dropped call history at the same time it dropped chat, which took away the easiest way to see how many calls the profile was sending you.
Check the numbers once a month
The Performance section of your profile shows how many people saw it, which searches they used, and how many called, clicked through to your site or asked for directions. Spend most of your time on the search terms. If people find you for “AC repair” but never for “furnace installation,” and furnaces are what you want to sell, your categories, services and description need work.
For a clearer picture of who called and where they came from, that’s what our analytics reporting is built for. And if you’d rather hand the profile off entirely, we do Google Business Profile management for businesses across Texoma.