1. The wrong primary category
A broad category like "Contractor" competes with everyone and matches nobody. The specific category that names your trade almost always ranks better for the searches that produce work.
2. Empty services section
Each service you offer can have its own name and description on your profile. Leaving them blank throws away the clearest relevance signal Google gives you for free.
3. A service area covering the whole state
Listing fifty cities does not extend your reach. It dilutes relevance for the ones you can actually serve profitably. Name the places you genuinely work.
4. Stock photos, or no photos
Google and prospects can both tell. Real job photos, uploaded regularly, and customer photos collected alongside reviews do far more than a polished stock gallery.
5. Reviews with no system
Sporadic asking produces sporadic reviews. Recency matters. So does whether the text mentions the service and the city. So does replying.
6. Never auditing the profile
Competitor spam, keyword-stuffed listing names, fake addresses and policy-violating reviews all affect who ranks. None of it fixes itself.
7. No ranking measurement
If you cannot say where you rank across your service area, you cannot say whether anything you did worked. A heat map and a local rank audit turn opinion into a grid you can compare month to month.
Start with a baseline
Before changing anything, get a heat map of where your Google Business Profile ranks today. Fix the seven items above, then run it again in thirty days.