How to write a Google profile description that says something

Most business descriptions read like they were written by somebody filling in a form at the end of a long day, which is exactly what happened. "We are a family-run business with over 20 years of experience providing quality service to customers throughout the region. Customer satisfaction is our top priority."

Read that as a stranger and ask what you have actually learned. They exist, they have been going a while, and they claim to be good, which is a claim every business on the page is making. Nothing in those two sentences would help anybody choose between them and the next four listings.

Why this field ends up so empty

It isn't laziness so much as the fact that the box gives you no brief at all. It says "describe your business", offers 750 characters, and leaves you to it — so in the absence of any other instruction people write the thing that sounds most like a business description, which is to say the thing that sounds like every other business description.

There's also a quiet fear of being too specific. Saying you mostly do bathrooms feels like turning away kitchen work. Saying you cover three towns feels smaller than saying you cover the county. So people reach for the vaguest version, and the vague version doesn't do anything.

Write it for one person with one worry

Here is a better brief than the one Google gives you. Picture the last customer who rang you sounding nervous, and ask yourself what they were worried about in the minutes before they picked up the phone.

It is usually one of a small handful of things. Will they turn up when they say they will, and will the price be what they quoted. Will they look down on me for letting it get this bad. Will they even take a job this small, and do they know about my kind of property, my kind of boiler, my kind of dog.

Your description has room for about four sentences, so spend them answering the one worry you hear most often. Do that and you will have written something none of your competitors has bothered to.

What actually belongs in there

There are four things worth having in there, in roughly this order.

What you do, in the words a customer would use. Not "domestic and commercial installation and maintenance", but something closer to "we fix and fit boilers, and we do the annual checks landlords need".

Where you do it, by name. Name the actual towns and neighbourhoods, because a customer who lives in one of them feels the click of recognition, and it is the most honest form of being findable there is.

One thing that is specifically true of you, meaning something a competitor could not copy and paste onto their own listing. You answer the phone yourself. You have been doing listed buildings for fifteen years. You take the small jobs nobody else will come out for, or you don't charge for the first visit.

What happens when somebody gets in touch, which is startlingly rare on these listings and startlingly effective when it is there. Something like "ring or message and I'll normally get back the same day, usually with a rough price before I come out" removes more hesitation than any claim about quality ever will.

What to keep out

Keyword lists. Something like "plumber Leeds plumber Bradford emergency plumber West Yorkshire" reads as spam to a human being and breaks Google's rules into the bargain. It doesn't work any more, and it makes you look cheap in the one place you needed to look solid.

Superlatives with nothing behind them, such as best, leading, premier or number one. Every reader discounts those automatically, so they cost you space and buy you nothing at all.

Your founding story, unless it is short and relevant. "Established 1987" is fine and does real work, whereas three sentences about your grandfather are a lovely thing to have on your website and the wrong use of a very small box.

Offers and prices. These change constantly, and the description is the field you are least likely to remember to update, so put "from £X" somewhere you look after properly rather than here.

A rewrite, side by side

Before:

We are a family-run business with over 20 years of experience providing quality service to customers throughout the region. Customer satisfaction is our top priority. Fully qualified and insured. Free quotes available.

After:

We fix and fit boilers, sort leaks and do landlord gas checks, mostly around Chorlton, Didsbury and Withington. I answer the phone myself, and if you send a photo I can usually give you a rough price before coming out. Small jobs are fine — a lot of what we do takes under an hour. Gas Safe registered, twenty-odd years at it.

Both are about the same length, but the second one has answered four real questions and given somebody a reason to ring rather than a reason to believe a claim.

The description can only carry so much

You have 750 characters and about eleven questions people want answered. Something is getting left out, and it will be the specific stuff: what happens if the job turns out bigger, whether you'd look at a system that old, whether there's a charge if you come out and can't fix it that day.

That's the piece we work on with hailera — you write the full set of answers once, check them, and publish them as an agent your website and the AI apps people ask can read directly, so the description does the introduction and the agent handles the follow-up questions. But a clear page on your own site does much the same for free, and if you don't have one, write that before anything else.

Write it badly first

The best trick for this field is to not write it in the field. Open a note on your phone and answer five questions in plain sentences: what do you do, where, who for, what's different about you, what happens when someone rings.

Don't try to make it sound like a business while you are writing it. Then read it back and delete anything that could appear word for word on a competitor's listing, and what's left will usually be short, slightly plain, and far better than what you had.

Today: read your current description and highlight every sentence that would still be true if a competitor copied it word for word. If that turns out to be most of it, you already know what the rewrite has to do.

Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.