Your page, your Google profile and a directory: what each one does
By Josi L.Published
Somebody texts you: “send me your page.” And you sit there looking at the phone.
You have a Facebook full of before and after photos. You have WhatsApp. And two years ago a kid built you something, and you honestly don’t know if it’s still up. Which one of those do you send?
They’re three different things, even though all three show up on the same screen. Each one does a job the other two can’t. Let’s go one at a time, in plain words. And if you’d rather jump straight to it, here’s what a page of your own comes with, line by line.
Your Google Business Profile
That’s the map pin. When somebody searches for cleaning plus the name of their town, the thing that comes up with the photo, the hours and the reviews is a Google Business Profile, and opening one costs nothing: Google says so in its own help pages.
Reviews from your customers live there, and that’s what gives the whole thing its weight. You don’t write them. You don’t take them down either. If one breaks Google’s rules you can report it, and then Google decides, not you and not the person who left it. That’s exactly why somebody searching believes what they read there.
What it doesn’t do: it isn’t yours. It lives inside Google, in the shape Google gives it, and the day they change how it looks, it changes for everybody at once.
Your own page
An address. Yours. With your photos, your video, your price written out, your hours and the towns you drive to.
It’s what you paste into a message when somebody asks for your page. And it’s the only one of the three where you decide everything: what shows up first, what you charge, what you don’t do, where you won’t go. If you’re not sure what number to put in there, that’s a whole conversation of its own in what we go over about setting your rate.
What it doesn’t do: an address by itself doesn’t reach anybody. Something has to carry it to people.
A directory
A site where a lot of cleaners sit together and people search by city. That’s what it’s built for: to put you in front of somebody who doesn’t know yet that you exist.
That’s the difference with Facebook. Slow down here a second. On Facebook you’re seen by people who already follow you. Your comadre, your neighbor, the customer you’ve had for years, the one who writes “looking good, keep it up.” A directory gets opened by the woman who just moved into your area, knows nobody, and is typing out what she needs.
What it doesn’t do: it’s not your house, it’s the market you stand in. Which is why your own thing has to exist too. Here the two come together: the directory, and your page inside it with an address of its own. Not every site does it that way.
The same three, side by side
| Google profile | A page of your own | A directory | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who it reaches | whoever searches the map for your town | whoever already asked you for it | whoever doesn’t know your name yet |
| Whose it is | Google’s | yours | the site’s |
| What it costs | nothing | $30 a month here | changes from site to site |
| The reviews | your customers write them, and you can’t take one down | you decide what goes on it | changes from site to site |
Read it across instead of down: no column can cover for the other two.
What only one of them can do
Only the Google profile puts you on the map. You know that box with the red pins at the top of the search? Your page doesn’t get in there. Neither does a directory. A Google profile goes in, or nothing of yours does.
Your own page is the one that travels whole in a text message, with nobody else’s brand across the top. Your address, your rules. New number, new price, a photo from Saturday’s job, and you change it yourself without asking anyone.
And only a directory puts you next to other people so somebody can compare. Whoever lands there didn’t come looking for your name, because they don’t know it. They came to see who works in their area, what each one charges and who works Saturdays. For somebody starting out, that’s a door that doesn’t depend on who you already know.
Here’s the part almost nobody looks at
And these aren’t people sitting around waiting. They have customers. They have time behind them, anywhere from 3 to 25 years in this directory. The one thing in that table that costs nothing is the one sitting untouched.
So here’s what it’s for. When your page links out to your Google, whoever is reading it can go and look at what your customers said, in a place where you can’t touch a thing. That reads completely differently than you saying it about yourself.
It’s copying an address and pasting it. One minute, coffee still in your other hand.
So which one are you missing?
“Send me your page.”
None of the three is better than the other two. One of them is missing, and usually it isn’t the one you think.
If you don’t have a Google profile, that’s the one that costs you nothing. You can open it from your phone, and digging up the photos takes longer than filling it in. If you have one but you’ve never pasted that link anywhere, you already know what comes next. And if you have both and you still end up sending a screenshot of Facebook every time somebody asks, then what’s missing is an address of your own. The kind you send in writing, and that looks the same on an old phone as on an office computer.
What your page here comes with, so you’re not guessing
- Your own address, with your name on it.
- Up to 12 photos and 45 seconds of video of the actual work.
- Your price and your hours written out, so whoever wants to know what you charge reads it there instead of asking you.
- The towns you drive to, one by one, not “and surrounding areas.”
- A link and a QR code to ask the customer you just finished with how it went, and what they answer shows up on your page.
- $30 a month. No cut of your jobs. No contract to get out of.
You build the whole thing before you pay anything. You fill it in, you see exactly how it looks, and then you decide.
You can open your account and start filling it in whenever you have twenty minutes and your photos handy.
The questions that come up over and over, what happens if you skip a month, who sees your phone number, how long a photo takes to show up, are answered in what owners ask us most before they publish.
And if you only do one thing today
Make it the one that’s free.
Open your Google profile, or go into the one you already have and check two things: your hours, and your photos. Then copy that address and drop it in the notes app on your phone.
The day you build your page, you’ll already be halfway there.