The Google Business Profile setup for a window cleaning company
Categories, service area, priced services, photos of glass that read on a phone, Posts, seeded Q and A, and the hours field most window cleaners skip.
Your Google Business Profile is the storefront. For a window cleaning company it does more work than the website, because most of the searches are on a phone, in a map, from someone who wants a price and a phone number and nothing else. And most profiles in this trade are half built. In the dataset behind the benchmark report, 68.4% of window cleaning companies list no hours at all and 17% have no rating because they have no reviews.
Here is the build, field by field, in the order that matters.
Categories: one primary, two or three secondary
Primary category: Window cleaning service. Not Cleaners, not Cleaning service, not Janitorial service. The primary category is the single strongest ranking lever on the profile and Google matches it almost literally to the search. Of the 14,348 listings in the dataset, the overwhelming majority already use Window cleaning service as primary, so getting this wrong drops you out of the set entirely.
Then add secondaries for the work you actually sell:
- Pressure washing service, if you do driveways, siding or concrete
- Gutter cleaning service, if you clear gutters
- House cleaning service, only if you genuinely do interiors
Do not stack categories you cannot perform. A secondary category tells Google to show you for those searches, and showing up for pressure washing when you do not own a surface cleaner produces calls you have to turn down. Two or three secondaries is the right number. Eight is spam.
The bundle matters more than it looks. A homeowner who books a $260 window clean and adds a $180 gutter clear-out doubles the value of the same drive time, and the gutter category is what puts you in front of them in October.
Service area, not a fake address
If you clean out of a truck and a garage, run it as a service area business and hide the address. If you have a real shop with a sign that a customer could walk into, keep the address visible. Do not invent an address in the neighboring city. Google is good at catching it now and the penalty is suspension, which in this trade means going dark during your best six weeks.
Set the service area to the cities you will genuinely drive to, usually 8 to 15 municipalities inside about a 30 minute radius. Do not set it to the whole state. A 100 mile service area does not rank you 100 miles out, it just dilutes the signal near home.
The Services list, with prices
Most window cleaners leave this section blank. Fill it. Each service takes a name, a description and an optional price, and it feeds both the profile and the AI answer engines that read the profile.
Write them the way customers say them:
- Exterior window cleaning, from $160
- Interior and exterior window cleaning, from $260
- Screen cleaning and track detailing, from $45
- Hard water stain removal, quoted per pane
- Gutter clearing, from $180
- Storefront window cleaning, monthly route, from $35 per visit
Prices scare some owners. Put them in anyway, as "from" prices. The calls you lose are the ones that were never going to buy, and at a low ticket you cannot afford to spend twenty minutes quoting a job that was hunting for $60. There is more on this in the pricing guide.
Photos of glass, which is hard to photograph
Clean glass photographs as nothing. That is the trade's specific problem. A perfect job looks like an empty frame on a phone screen.
What works:
- Shoot the before and after from the exact same spot, same time of day, same tripod height if you can. The comparison is the story.
- Get the squeegee mid-pull with the clean stripe behind it and the dirt still ahead of it. That single frame is the most useful photo a window cleaner can own.
- Shoot into a reflection. A clean window reflecting a sky or a tree reads as clean. A clean window shot flat reads as an empty hole.
- Include people and equipment. A tech on a ladder with a stabilizer, or a water-fed pole reaching a second-story pane, tells the homeowner you do the high glass without scaffolding.
- Show the truck with the logo and the ladder rack. It is the thing they will see in the driveway.
Upload 5 to 10 new photos a month. 91.7% of window cleaning listings have at least one photo, so having one is not an edge. Having thirty recent ones is.
Posts, Q and A, messaging, hours
Posts. One a week, 60 to 100 words, tied to the season. In March: "Spring exterior specials, whole-house exterior from $160, booking three weeks out." In November: "Pre-holiday interior and exterior, book before the 20th." Posts do not rank you directly, they convert the person already looking at your profile.
Q and A. You are allowed to ask and answer your own questions, and you should, because otherwise a stranger answers them wrong. Seed six:
- Do you clean screens and tracks? Yes, screens and sills are included; deep track detailing is $45.
- Do you do second story windows? Yes, with a water-fed pole from the ground on most homes.
- Are you insured? Yes, general liability and workers comp, certificate on request.
- How often should windows be cleaned? Twice a year for most homes, quarterly if you are near a dirt road or the coast.
- Do you do storefronts? Yes, weekly, biweekly and monthly routes.
- Do you clean gutters too? Yes, and booking both on one visit saves a trip charge.
Insurance is a real trust signal in a trade that puts a stranger on a ladder above your driveway. Say it on the profile, not just on the website.
Messaging. Turn it on only if someone will answer inside 15 minutes during business hours. An unanswered message thread is worse than no messaging. See the missed calls guide for how to cover this.
Hours. Fill them. Real ones. 19.3% of window cleaning companies show Saturday hours, and Saturday is when homeowners are home and willing to let a crew in for interiors. If you work Saturdays, say so, because it is a genuine differentiator against the two thirds of the trade that lists nothing at all.
Tag the website link
Put a UTM on the website field so you can tell profile traffic from ad traffic:
https://yoursite.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gbp
Then check it monthly against your booked jobs. If the profile sends 200 sessions and your ads send 60, you know where the next hour of work goes. The website guide covers what that traffic should land on.
Frequently asked
How long until profile changes show up? Category and service edits usually go live within a day or two, though Google may hold an edit for manual review. Ranking movement from a better profile takes four to eight weeks, and it moves faster in a small city than in a metro.
Should I make a second profile for the pressure washing side? Only if it is a separately named business with its own phone and its own customers. A second profile at the same address with the same phone gets merged or suspended. One profile with pressure washing as a secondary category is safer and usually ranks better.
Do keywords in the business name help? Adding "Best Window Cleaning of Denver" when your legal name is Smith Services violates Google's naming rules and competitors report it. It does work until it gets reported, and then you lose the profile. Not worth it.
Profile work is included in the free 14-day trial if you would rather have it done than do it. Text or call (385) 832-6175.