Fix the four things that decide your Google Maps position

Time: about an hour. Cost: free.

Google decides local results on three things: how relevant you are to what was typed, how close you are to the person searching, and how well known you are.

Only two of those are yours to change. Nobody can make you closer to the searcher. If anyone has promised you a map covered in green pins across your whole region, they were either showing you someone else's screenshot or picking a search term nobody actually types. That is the honest starting point, and everything below is what is genuinely in your control.

Almost every Google profile that underperforms has a problem in one of four places. The rest of the profile matters for whether someone chooses you, which is worth doing, but it is not what decides your position.

1. Your primary category

This is the single most important field on your entire profile, and it takes two minutes to check.

Google lets you pick one primary category and up to nine extras. The primary one does most of the work. A lot of businesses pick something that sounds right rather than something that matches what they actually get paid for.

What to do

1. Write down the one job you make the most money from. Not everything you can do. The one that pays the bills.
2. Search that job plus your town on Google, on your phone, from your work address.
3. Look at the businesses Google shows. Their category is on their profile.
4. If they are all in a category you are not in, that is your answer.

Change the primary category on its own, write down the date, and change nothing else for two weeks. Otherwise you will never know what worked.

Then add up to about four extra categories, but only ones you genuinely do. Extra categories put you in front of people searching for those jobs. If you cannot do the job well, the call is worse than useless.

2. Your reviews

Reviews are the second biggest factor, and the words in them count, not just the stars.

A profile with 90 reviews averaging 4.6 usually beats one with 12 reviews at a perfect 5.0. A perfect five also converts slightly worse than a 4.7, because people assume it is fake.

What to do

Stop running review pushes and build one habit instead.

Ask at the moment the job is finished and the customer is happy, not when you send the invoice.
Text, do not email. They are already holding the phone.
Send the short review link directly. Never say "search us on Google".
Have the person who did the work ask, by name.
Add one line: "even a sentence about what we did is a big help". That gets you review text instead of a bare star rating, and text is what Google reads.

A steady three or four a month beats twenty in one week. A sudden pile looks artificial and Google can filter them.

Do not offer a discount, a draw entry or anything else in exchange. Do not survey people first and only send the link to the happy ones. Both are against Google's rules and both are detectable.

Reply to every review, good and bad, within a few days. The reply to a bad review is not written for the person who left it. It is written for the next customer reading it. Thank them, acknowledge the issue, say what you did about it, and give them a name and a number to call. Never argue.

3. Your hours

Being open at the moment somebody searches is an actual ranking factor, not just a convenience.

What to do

Check your regular hours are right.
Set your special hours for every public holiday for the rest of the year. New Year, Waitangi Day, Easter, ANZAC Day, King's Birthday, Matariki, Labour Day, Christmas, Boxing Day, and your regional anniversary day.

Almost nobody does the second one. It takes fifteen minutes once a year and it stops the "hours might differ" warning that makes people ring someone else.

4. Where your website link points

Most profiles link to their homepage because that is the default.

Point it at the page that matches your primary category instead. If your primary category is Electrician and you have a page about electrical work, link that page. Make sure that page has your business name, address and phone on it, written exactly the same way as on your Google profile.

The things that are worth doing but will not move your position

Do these. Just know what they are for. They decide whether someone who has already found you picks up the phone, which matters, but they are not what gets you found.

Photos. Real, recent, your actual work and your actual people.
Posts. Offers and genuine news. Once a week is plenty.
Questions and answers. Add the three or four questions you get asked every week, and answer them yourself.
Services and attributes. Fill these in properly. This is where your service keywords belong, and it is free.

Three things people will tell you to do that you should not

Do not add your town or your trade to your business name. "Smith Plumbing Tauranga Hot Water" does rank better than "Smith Plumbing". It is also against Google's rules, it is the most reported violation there is, and any competitor can report it in about four minutes. If a competitor above you is doing it, you can report them instead, using Google's Business Redressal Complaint Form. That is free and it works more often than people expect.

Do not geotag your photos. You will find plenty of advice telling you to add GPS data to your images. The one proper study on this tracked 27 businesses over ten weeks and found six of seven measures got worse or stayed flat. Google's own search advocate has said there is no need to do it.

Do not build a page for every town near you. One honest page describing where you work is good. Thirty near-identical pages with the town name swapped out is what Google calls a doorway page, and it is against their spam policy.

Last step: make everything agree

Everything above only works if your details are identical everywhere. One version of your business name. One phone format. One address, or none if you work from home and do not want it public.

Open your List-It listing and check it matches your Google profile exactly, character for character. Business name, phone, address, website.

That is not busywork. Google and the AI assistants that people now ask for recommendations both work by finding the same facts about you in several places they trust. One source saying it is a claim. Four sources agreeing is a fact.