Maintaining Your Business Profile: A Guide

The main category is the most consequential field in the whole profile. It shapes which queries put your firm in the running, which additional fields are offered to you and which other firms you are compared with. For most firms the main category is landscape gardening itself. Everything else — paving, tree care, fencing, pond construction, grounds maintenance, winter services — belongs in the secondary categories. A useful test: write down the sentence a customer uses on the phone to describe their request. If it says “lay out a new garden”, the category is obvious. If it says “fell a tree”, you need a matching secondary category, or you will not appear for that search.

The opposite mistake is widespread: everything remotely applicable gets ticked. That feels generous at first but produces enquiries you do not want to serve, and it blurs the picture the search service holds of your firm. If you provide winter services solely for existing customers with a maintenance contract, the winter services category is a poor idea — it only leads to December calls you have to turn down. Conversely, a trade you actively want to sell and have capacity for needs both the category in the profile and its own page on the website for the profile to point to.

Almost every profile allows a service area to be stored. For landscaping firms this matters more than for a shop with walk-in customers, because the work happens at the customer's place and not at the yard. Two options are available: a radius around your own address, or a list of towns and districts. In practice the list of towns is the more workable solution, because it matches reality: a firm from the countryside around Hildesheim may drive as far as Hannover but not equally far in every direction — motorway access, terrain and customer structure decide. A list of towns reflects that; an even circle on the map does not.

What matters is that the entry is honest. Anyone who draws the area so wide that the journey no longer pays produces enquiries that fail at the quote stage — and that costs more time than the visibility gained. Conversely, the area should include the town where you genuinely work on a regular basis, even if it is not directly adjacent. Firms without walk-in customers at the yard can hide the address in many profiles and show only the service area. That is permitted and sensible, but it should match the details in the imprint, where the full address is named in any case.

The third rule: whatever stands in the profile as a service area should have a counterpart on the website. If your profile names six towns but the website mentions only the registered office, the entry remains a claim. A short page per important town — with the tasks typical there, one or two projects and the travel time — turns the claim into a statement people can follow, and at the same time gives a reason to substantiate the area for searchers beyond the neighbouring village.

In landscaping, photos are the reason anyone opens a profile at all. Unlike many services, the result of your work can be shown: a finished patio in the evening light, a clean edge between paving and lawn, a fence that follows the slope of the ground. The first image is the most important one, because it appears in the overview next to the company name. It should be in landscape format, show a completed job and work without any text. A logo as the cover image wastes that space — it says nothing about what you can do.

A mixture works well: finished projects in sufficient number, one or two shots of the team, an image of the fleet and a view of the yard. Before-and-after pairs are powerful but require care, because the “before” often shows someone else's property in an unflattering state. Recognisable people require consent, and photographs on customer property require an agreement with the owner — most easily arranged with the order confirmation. What applies legally in an individual case should be clarified with your legal adviser. How to obtain usable shots with simple means is shown on our page about photos for your website.

A yard changes address, a sole trader becomes a limited company, the son takes over: in all these cases most problems arise not from the change itself but from the order in which it is carried out. The central rule for a relocation is this: change the existing profile instead of creating a second one. A new profile starts from zero — no reviews, no history, none of the references built up over the years. Address changes often go through a verification at the search services that can take several days; plan for that lead time instead of starting on moving day.

With a renaming, the name is the critical point. It appears in the profile, the imprint, the invoice, on the van, on the site board and in the quote. A step-by-step switch spread over months produces exactly the contradictions that unsettle prospects and make your data harder to attribute. Set a cut-off date from which the new name applies, and follow up promptly with the profile, website, imprint and business stationery. The legal form belongs everywhere in full — a limited company in the commercial register that still appears as a sole trader in the profile is an avoidable stumbling block.

A business handover adds a question few people think about: who technically owns the profile? What is handed over is not only the firm but also ownership of the profile account. If a new profile is created instead, you lose the reviews of past years — work nobody gets back. Because such occasions touch nearly every detail anyway, a handover is often the right moment to review the website as well; which steps are involved and what carries over from the old site is described on our page about the landscaping website relaunch.

Many firms discover at first glance that they have no access to their own profile. Profiles partly arise automatically from map data and directories, and partly were created years ago by a temp, a family member or a former service provider — with a private e-mail address nobody can reach any more. The first step is therefore to claim ownership for the firm. Depending on the procedure this takes a few days, because a confirmation goes to the business address or phone number, and it is the precondition for everything else.

After that the rule is: the account belongs to the firm, not to a person. Store a business e-mail address as the owner and at least a second person as a manager, so that holidays, illness or a departure do not block access. Decide who is responsible inside the firm — in smaller firms that is usually the office, in larger ones the person who also looks after the website — and note where the credentials are kept. It sounds trivial, but it is the most common reason a profile goes untouched for years (project experience).