Google Business Profile for a Wrexham business: field by field

The Google Business Profile is the most valuable free thing a Wrexham business owns and the most neglected. It decides whether you appear on the map, what people see when they search your name, and increasingly what an AI assistant says about you. This is the profile, field by field, in the order we fill it for clients, with the Wrexham specifics: the Welsh place names, the service area, the Chester line, and the things that get profiles suspended here.

Name

Your real trading name, exactly as it appears on the shopfront or the van. Not "Wrexham Emergency Plumber" if the business is called something else. Google reads the storefront on Street View and compares; keyword-stuffed names get suspended, and the appeal takes weeks. If your name genuinely contains the trade or the town, keep it.

Category

The primary category is the single strongest signal on the profile. It should be the thing you want more of, in Google's own words: "Plumber", not "Contractor"; "Restaurant", not "Bar"; "Family law attorney", not "Lawyer". Then every true secondary category. A garage that does MOTs needs "MOT testing station" as a category, not a mention in the description; a builder who does extensions wants "Building firm" primary with "Home builder" and "General contractor" alongside.

Services and products

Google offers a predefined list per category; tick every one that is true, then add your own with a short description and a from-price where you use one. The services feed the map for searches like "boiler service Wrexham" that are more specific than the category. A cafe or a shop uses the products feature the same way: the menu, the ranges, with prices.

Address and service area

A shop, a clinic, a restaurant or an office keeps the address on the map. A trade working from a van or a home hides the address and shows a service area instead; that is the correct set-up and Google ranks it fine. The service area is the districts and towns you actually go to, named the way people type them: Rhos, Coedpoeth, Gwersyllt, Gresford, Chirk, Mold, Chester. Not every town within thirty miles, which Google ignores past a point and which makes the profile look like a lead-generation front.

Google merges Wrexham and Wrecsam, and each village with its Welsh spelling, so the profile does not need both. Use the one your customers use.

Hours

Exact, including Saturdays, the early finish on Friday, and the bank holidays. "Open now" is a ranking factor at the moment people search, and a profile that says closed on a Saturday morning loses the Saturday morning searches to the one that says open. Special hours for Christmas and the Easter weekend take two minutes and are almost never set.

Description

Seven hundred and fifty characters. The first sentence says what you do and where, in plain words, because that is the sentence assistants quote. Then the services, the areas, how long you have been in Wrexham, anything you are known for. No keyword lists, no "best in Wrexham", no phone numbers (Google strips them).

Photos

The frontage from the street (Google matches it to Street View), the inside, the van, the team, the work, the plates if you serve food. Twenty to start and a few every month. Customers in a town this size recognise the street and the faces, and profiles with recent photos get more calls than profiles with more reviews and old photos. No stock, no logos as photos.

Reviews

The pace matters more than the total: two a month, steadily, beats thirty from the year you opened. Reviews that mention the work and the place ("fixed our boiler in Rhosddu the same day") are worth more than five stars with no words, to Google and to assistants. Reply to every one within a day, including the bad ones, calmly. The routine is in our reviews guide.

Questions and answers, posts, messaging

Seed the questions with what people ask on the phone: parking, card payments, do you come out to Llangollen, is there a waiting list. Post monthly: a job, an offer, a seasonal note. Turn messaging on only if someone will answer it within an hour; an unanswered message is worse than no button.

What gets Wrexham profiles suspended

• Keywords added to the name.
• A virtual office or a friend's address presented as a base.
• Two profiles for one business, one old and one new.
• Reviews from staff, family or bought in a batch.
• A category that does not match what the storefront shows.

Verification is usually by video now: a walk from the street to the door to the inside, showing signage and something with the address on it. It passes first time when the address is real and the signage exists. It does not pass for a van business with no signage at a home address, which is why those businesses hide the address and use the service area instead.