Related: Your Google Business Profile primary category is doing more work than you think
Last month I went through about fifteen Google Business Profiles for businesses in the east end. I was looking at one thing specifically: the services section.
Of those fifteen, four had nothing in it at all. Eight had entries, but they were single words. Haircut. Colour. Consultation. Three had actual descriptions written out.
The three with real descriptions were not the biggest businesses on the list. They were just the ones where somebody sat down for twenty minutes and typed.
Why this section is not decoration
Here is the part that changes how you think about it. The text you put in your services is indexed. Google reads it and matches it against what people search for.
That puts it in a different class from most of the profile. Your hours are data. Your photos are images. Your services section is words that can match queries, which makes it one of the few places on your profile where you get to decide which phrases Google associates with you.
This matters most for the long tail. Nobody has a shortage of competition for "hair salon toronto." However, "balayage on dark hair" or "emergency drain snaking" or "orthotics fitting" are searches with real intent behind them and far fewer businesses claiming them clearly. If your profile never says those words, you are relying on Google to infer them. Sometimes it does. Often it does not.
Additionally, this section feeds the near me searches that local businesses actually live on. When someone searches "physiotherapy near me," Google needs to decide which nearby practices are a strong match. A profile that lists and describes its specific treatments gives Google something to work with. A profile with three one word entries gives it almost nothing.
What belongs in a service description
Each service gets a name and a description of up to 1,000 characters. You do not need to use all of it. Two to four sentences is usually plenty.
What I look for in a good one:
What it actually is, in plain words. Not the industry term, the customer term. A customer does not search for "periodontal maintenance." They search for "deep cleaning teeth." Use the phrase the customer uses, and mention the technical name second if it matters.
Who it is for or when they need it. "For customers whose sink drains slowly or backs up after heavy rain" tells Google and the reader something that "Drain cleaning" does not.
What is included or how long it takes. Concrete details do double duty. They match more searches, and they answer the question a hesitant customer is actually sitting on.
Where you do it, if that varies. If you only service certain neighbourhoods for a particular job, say so.
Here is the difference in practice. Instead of:
- Drain cleaning
Something like:
- Drain cleaning. We clear slow and blocked drains in kitchens, bathrooms, and basement floor drains. This covers snaking the line and checking for the cause, so a recurring blockage does not come back in a month. Most calls in The Beaches and Leslieville are same day or next day.
That is three sentences. It took a minute to write. It now contains a dozen phrases a one word entry did not.
How specific should you get
More specific than feels natural, and less specific than a catalogue.
The failure mode on one side is obvious: one word entries that say nothing. The failure mode on the other side is listing forty services because you technically offer them, which produces a wall of text nobody reads and dilutes the things you actually want.
The approach I would take is to start from money rather than from completeness. Write down the five or six things that make up most of your work. Describe those properly. Then add the handful of secondary things you genuinely want more of, with a sentence each. Stop there.
The reason to stop is that this section is not just for Google. Someone comparing you against two competitors is reading it. A focused list of things you clearly do well reads better than an exhaustive list where the important work is buried in the middle.
Service list versus keyword dump
There is a version of this advice that goes wrong, and I want to be direct about it.
A keyword dump looks like this: "Drain cleaning, drain cleaning Toronto, drain cleaning near me, best drain cleaning Toronto, emergency drain cleaning Toronto Ontario." Somebody read that keywords help and concluded more keywords help more.
That does not work, for two reasons. First, Google is not counting how many times you said drain cleaning. Repeating a phrase with a city bolted on does not make you a better match, and stuffing is exactly the pattern its spam systems are built to spot. Second, and more practically, a human reads that and closes the tab.
The distinction I would hold onto is this. A service list describes real things a customer can buy from you, in the words a customer would use. A keyword dump describes searches you would like to rank for. The first one happens to work for search because it is genuinely informative. The second one is trying to work for search and fails at both jobs.
If you are unsure which side of the line you are on, read your entry out loud as if you were explaining it to somebody standing in front of you. If it sounds insane, it is a dump.
Where to find it
The section is in the profile editor, usually under Services, or under Menu if your category is a restaurant or a food business. Some categories give you Products instead, which behaves similarly.
One thing worth knowing: Google pre-populates suggestions based on your category. Those suggestions are a reasonable starting list, and it is fine to accept the ones that fit. However, accepting the suggestions and stopping there is how you end up with the one word entries, because the suggestions come with no descriptions. Accept them, then go back and write a description on each one that matters.
This is also a place where your category choice shows up again. The services Google offers you are drawn from your primary category, so a business with a too broad category gets a too broad set of suggestions. If the suggested services do not look like your work, that is worth taking as a signal about the category itself.
If you want a read on your own profile before you start, the free check on this site looks at whether your services and description are pulling their weight or sitting empty.
What strikes me about this section is that it is the closest thing a Google Business Profile has to a page you control, and it is the one most people leave blank. Twenty minutes of typing, once, and then years of it quietly working.
So I am curious. If you opened your own services section right now, would you find sentences in there, or would you find a list of single words somebody clicked through during setup?