Somebody needs a plumber. They pick up a phone, they type something close to what they mean, and they hire whoever looks obvious.
That has not changed. What changed is the top of the page. Google now often writes a summary above the map, and the summary answers the question before the map gets a chance to.
What that actually changes
Less traffic arrives at your listing, because some people get what they needed from the summary and act on it. Being named in that summary is worth having, and being absent from it is worth fixing.
It does not mean the map stopped mattering. People still tap it, call from it, and read the reviews on it. It means there is now more than one place to be, and the work that gets you into one gets you into the other.
Your Google listing is still the foundation
It is the thing both the map and the summary read first.
- Details that match everywhere. Name, address, and phone identical across your listing, your site, and the directories. Where they disagree, both systems have to guess which is right.
- The right categories. Primary and secondary, chosen to say what you do rather than everything you could conceivably do.
- Photos of the actual work. Finished jobs, your vehicles, your crew. Stock images tell a customer nothing and signal nothing.
- Questions answered. The question section on your listing gets used, and an unanswered one sits there.
- Reviews replied to. Including the bad ones, especially the bad ones. The reply is read by the next customer more carefully than the review is.
Your website has one job here
To confirm what the listing claims and to answer what the customer asks next.
- It has to work on a phone. Nearly all of this happens on one, and slow and awkward on a phone is slow and awkward for every customer you have.
- It has to be easy to contact you from. A tappable phone number, and a form that is not buried.
- It has to say where you work. Not a list of every town within an hour, but the places you genuinely serve, in the words a customer would use.
- It has to answer real questions. What a job involves, what changes the price, how long it takes. That is the content that gets read, and the content a summary can quote.
Reviews are the part owners underrate
They are the closest thing to a stranger vouching for you, and both the map and the summary treat them that way.
Ask for them, and ask at the moment the customer is happiest, which is usually when you are packing up rather than a week later by email. Ask for the work and the place to be mentioned, because a review naming the job and the town does far more than a star rating on its own.
Then reply to them. All of them.
What does not work
Writing for the machine instead of the customer. Pages built around a phrase, towns listed that you do not serve, reviews that arrived too neatly. Those were a bad idea when they only had to fool a search engine, and more than one system is reading now.
What it comes down to
None of this is a trick. It is a business being findable, consistent, and obviously still open, written down where both systems can read it.