The Categories You Pick Matter More Than You Think

What the field actually does

It tells the search engine what kind of business you are, and that answer decides which searches you can appear in.

Not how well you rank for them. Whether you are eligible at all.

A business categorised as one thing is largely competing for searches about that thing. Searches about an adjacent service, even one you genuinely provide, may not include you.

Which makes it the highest-leverage field on the listing, and it is chosen in a hurry during setup by somebody picking whatever appeared first in the dropdown.

Primary against secondary

You get one primary and several additional ones, and they are not equal.

The primary carries substantially more weight. It is the answer to what this business mainly is.

Secondary categories broaden your eligibility and influence less. They are worth adding and they will not compensate for a primary that is wrong.

The practical implication: if you do one thing that pays well and several that pay less, the primary should be the one that pays well, not the one you happen to do most often.

How to choose it

1. Write down what you most want more of, in revenue terms.
2. Search for that service in your town and see who appears.
3. Look at what those businesses are categorised as, which is visible on their listings.
4. Find the closest match in the available list.
5. Add the rest as secondary, in order of importance.
6. Check what your competitors use that you have not.

The third is the most useful step and almost nobody does it. The businesses already ranking for the search you want are telling you which category produces that result.

The specific against the general

A real tension worth understanding.

A specific category matches a narrow set of searches strongly. A general one matches a wider set weakly.

For most small businesses, specific wins. Being the obvious answer for one thing beats being a marginal answer for five.

The exception is a genuinely general business, where the specific option would misrepresent what you do and lose you more than it gains.

Where a business has two genuinely distinct halves, the honest answer is sometimes two listings, provided each has its own address and phone number and the separation is real rather than an attempt to appear twice.

A worked example

A contractor doing both general renovation work and, increasingly, bathroom fitting, which was the more profitable half.

His listing was categorised as a general contractor, chosen at setup because that was what the business had been in 2014.

Searching for bathroom fitting in his town, the map showed three specialists and he was absent, despite doing more bathrooms than any of them.

Changing the primary category to the bathroom-specific option, and keeping general contractor as secondary, took two minutes.

Over the following months he began appearing for the bathroom searches. He also appeared slightly less for general renovation searches, which was the trade he had deliberately made.

That trade is the whole decision. There is no arrangement that maximises everything, and pretending otherwise is why the field gets left alone.

Adding too many

The opposite mistake, and it is common.

Adding every category that plausibly applies dilutes rather than broadens. It also risks the listing being categorised as something you barely do, and it can attract enquiries you do not want.

A reasonable number is a primary plus a handful of genuine secondaries. Not fifteen.

The test for each one: would you be pleased to receive an enquiry from somebody searching for this. If not, remove it, however accurate it technically is.

When the list does not contain you

A frequent frustration.

The available categories are a fixed list and it does not cover every trade. Some specialisms simply have no entry.

Where that happens, pick the nearest broader option as primary and use the description and the services section to be specific. Those do not carry the same weight and they are not nothing.

New categories do get added over time, so it is worth checking again occasionally rather than assuming the list is fixed forever. Trades that had no entry three years ago sometimes have one now.

The services list underneath it

Separate from categories and frequently confused with them.

Alongside the category, the listing lets you enumerate individual services, each with a short description. That list is not restricted to a fixed set, so it is where the specificity the categories cannot express actually goes.

A business categorised broadly can still list twelve named services, each described in a sentence. Somebody comparing two listings sees that detail, and it answers the question of whether you do their particular job.

It takes half an hour to complete properly and most listings leave it empty, which is a straightforward advantage available to anybody willing to spend the time.

Write each description for a customer rather than as a keyword. The list is read by people deciding whether to call.

Revisiting it

The step nobody schedules.

Businesses change what they do. The category chosen when you started may describe a business you have grown out of.

Worth reviewing annually, or whenever a service becomes a significant share of revenue. It is a two-minute change with a real effect.

Changing it does cause some movement in your visibility while things settle, which is normal and not a reason to change it back within a fortnight. Give it two months before judging.

What it will not fix

Proportion, because the category is powerful and not magic.

It will not overcome distance. Somebody searching from thirty kilometres away is unlikely to see you regardless of how well you are categorised.

It will not compensate for having no reviews, no photographs and incomplete details.

And it will not make you eligible for searches about something you genuinely do not do, which is the correct behaviour even when it is inconvenient.

What the category does is make sure you are considered for the searches you should be winning. Everything else on the listing then decides whether you win them.

The rest of the listing that supports it is covered in claiming your Google My Business listing.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.