Google Business Profile for electricians: the parts that move the map

The map pack is decided mostly by the profile, not the website. Primary category, distance from the searcher, whether you are open at the moment they search, the words in your business name, your rating and how many reviews back it up, and whether the services and hours are actually filled in. Get those right and a plain website ranks. Get them wrong and no amount of website work rescues it.

Primary category: the single biggest lever

Google lets you pick one primary category and several additional ones. The primary is the one it uses to decide which searches you belong in. For almost every domestic and commercial electrician the right primary is "Electrician". We see profiles set to "Electrical installation service" or "Contractor" because that is what the owner clicked first, and those profiles are missing from searches they should own. Additional categories are for the things you also do: electrical installation service, EV charging station contractor if you install chargers, emergency electrician if you genuinely answer at night.

Services: tick every one you actually do

Google offers a list of predefined services under each category. They used to be cosmetic. In the 2026 local ranking survey run by Whitespark, having those predefined services filled in jumped nearly sixty places in importance, into the top twenty-five factors. Go through the list and tick everything you do: rewiring, consumer unit replacement, fault finding, EV charger installation, EICR and landlord certificates, outdoor lighting, and so on. Add custom ones for the jobs the list misses. Each is a signal that you belong in that search.

Hours: be open when people search

The same survey put "business is open at the time of search" at number five of all map pack factors. Google favours profiles that are open right now. That does not mean lying about 24-hour cover. It means setting the hours you genuinely answer the phone, including evenings and Saturdays if you do, and using the special hours feature for bank holidays instead of leaving the profile saying you are open on Christmas Day. If you run an emergency line, say so in the hours and answer it.

Name, address and service area

The business name on the profile must be your real trading name, exactly as it appears on your van and your website. Adding "Wrexham Electrician" to a name that is actually "J Smith Electrical" is against the guidelines and gets profiles suspended; we have seen it happen. If you work from home and customers never visit, set the profile as a service-area business and hide the address, then list the towns you genuinely cover. If you have a unit customers come to, show it, and make sure the pin is on the right building.

Reviews: steady beats sudden

Rating matters, count matters, and recency matters. Three profiles with 4.9 stars will be separated by how many reviews they have and how recent the last one is. The mistake is asking every customer you ever had in one week: a burst of thirty reviews followed by silence looks manufactured. Ask at the end of every job, in person, then send the link that evening. Reply to every review, including the bad ones, briefly and without arguing. Never buy reviews, never ask family. Google's filters are better than people think and a suspended profile is months of lost work.

Photos, description and the rest

• Photos of actual jobs, your van, and you. Phone photos are fine. Stock photos of a smiling model in a hard hat are worse than nothing.
• A description in plain English that says what you do, where, and for whom, without stuffing town names into it.
• The website link pointing to the page about the thing you most want to sell, not necessarily the homepage.
• Questions and answers filled in by you, with the questions customers actually ask on the phone.
• Posts are optional. They help a customer decide, they do not move rankings much, so do them when you have something real to say.

The whole profile pass takes about an hour if you have the photos ready. It is the highest return hour in local marketing, and it needs repeating every few months, because Google adds services, hours drift and reviews stop if nobody asks.