Pull out your phone, open Google Maps, and search your own business name. Not your website. Maps. What comes up is your Google Business Profile, and it's the thing most people in Abbotsford see before they ever reach your site, if they reach it at all. This check takes about ten minutes. Do it this week, because the holiday hours question is about to come up and it's easier to fix one thing at a time.
First, does the listing exist and is it yours? If there's an "Own this business?" link, nobody has claimed it, which means Google is showing whatever it scraped and anyone can suggest edits. Claim it. If a former employee or an old agency claimed it years ago and you can't get in, that's a slower fix, and it's worth starting now rather than in January.
Now the actual check, in the order I do it.
The primary category. Tap into the listing and look at the one-line category under your name. This single field does more for your map pack position than anything else on the profile. It needs to be the specific thing you are. "Plumber", not "Contractor". "Dental clinic", not "Health". A café on Montrose that's listed as "Restaurant" is competing with every restaurant in town for a search it didn't want. You can add secondary categories after, but the primary one is the one to get right.
Hours. Compare them to the sign on the door. A lot of profiles still show the hours from before a renovation, or "Open 24 hours" because somebody ticked a box in a hurry. Google asks customers to confirm hours, and the customers will. While you're there, set the special hours for Remembrance Day, Christmas and New Year's now. It takes two minutes in November and saves a one-star review in December.
The photos. Scroll through them. The cover photo is probably from the week you opened, or it's one a customer took of the parking lot. You can't delete customer photos, only flag them, so don't bother. Add five of your own instead: the front of the building, the inside, you or your crew, the work. Real phone photos from this month beat a professional shoot from 2019 for telling a searcher the place is alive.
The service area. This is the one that's wrong most often. If you're a mobile business (a landscaper, a mobile mechanic, a cleaner), you set a service area instead of showing an address. Owners tend to set it to "British Columbia" on the theory that bigger is better. It isn't. Google uses that setting to decide which searches you belong in, and a listing that claims to serve the whole province looks less relevant to someone in Clearbrook than one that says Abbotsford, Mission, Chilliwack and Langley. Pick the towns you'd actually drive to on a Tuesday. Google's own help for business profiles is at support.google.com/business if you want the rules in their words.
The phone number and the website link. Tap them. Does the number ring the right phone? Does the link go to your site and not to a Facebook page you stopped updating in 2022? Then open your website and check that the phone number there matches the one on the profile, digit for digit, same formatting. Google notices mismatches, and so do the directories that copy from it.
The description. There's a free-text field most people leave blank or fill with a slogan. Write three plain sentences: what you do, where you do it, how long you've been doing it. "We've fixed furnaces and heat pumps in Abbotsford and Mission since 2008" tells a person and a search engine the same useful thing.
Questions and answers. There's a Q&A section on the listing that anyone can post to, including competitors and bored people. Check whether someone has asked "are you open Sundays" and whether a stranger answered wrong. You can post your own questions and answer them, which is a legitimate way to put the three things people always ask right on the profile.
Reviews. Not whether you have enough (you'll never feel you do), but whether the last few have a reply from you. An unanswered one-star sits there telling every searcher you don't read these. A short, calm reply from the owner tells them you do.
That's the ten minutes. If everything above was already right, you're ahead of most of the businesses on South Fraser Way and you can get back to work. If three or four things were wrong, fix them tonight, then watch your map pack spot over the next few weeks. It doesn't always move, but when it does, it moves faster than anything you can do on the website.
If you'd rather someone else kept this right every month, that's what the Local SEO plan is, from $99 a month. But do the ten minutes yourself first. You'll learn more about your own listing than any report would tell you.