The section of your Google profile that matches what people actually search.

Somebody set your profile up, ticked a handful of services from a list Google offered, and never opened that screen again. It is one of the most common states a local listing can be in.

What the section is for

Google describes it plainly: when local customers search for an offering you provide, that service may be highlighted on your profile.

That is the connection between a listing and a specific job. Not your category, which says roughly what kind of business you are, but the individual thing somebody is trying to get done this afternoon.

It is also gated by category. Services are available to businesses in certain categories, particularly service businesses, and Google does not publish a full list of which ones qualify, so if the option is not on your profile that is the likely reason rather than a fault.

Where the suggested list runs out

Google offers predefined services based on your category. A plumbing business is shown things like install faucet or repair toilet, which are sensible and generic, and most people accept the suggestions and finish.

You can also add custom services, and this is where the real work is. The suggested list describes your trade in general. Your custom entries describe the jobs you actually take, in the phrasing your customers use, including the profitable ones nobody thought to put in a dropdown.

Why your custom service was rejected

There is a documented naming rule, and it explains a failure people usually blame on the interface. Custom service names must avoid profanity, gibberish, personal information, prices, and phone numbers. Entries that break it are rejected automatically.

So "Drain Clearing from $99" will not save. Neither will "Emergency Callout 713-555-0142".

Nothing explains this clearly at the time. The entry simply does not take.

The price goes in the price field

Worth being precise here, because the rule above is easy to over-read. You can add pricing to a service, along with a description, and organise services into categories. What you cannot do is put the number in the name.

Which is a reasonable place to think about whether you publish prices at all. If you have decided your work has a number, this is a good surface to put it on, because the person reading is mid-decision rather than browsing.

Use their words, not your invoice

The mistake worth avoiding is filling custom services with the language of your trade rather than your customers. Nobody searches for "hydronic system diagnostics".

The phrases you want are sitting in your call log and your inbox, which is the same source that decides what belongs on a service page. Go back through the last twenty jobs and write each one down twice: once as it appeared on the invoice, and once in the words the customer used when they first rang. The second column is the useful one, and it is usually shorter, blunter and slightly wrong in a way that tells you exactly how people think about the problem. Somebody does not have a failed thermocouple. They have no hot water. Both lists come out of that exercise, and it takes about twenty minutes.

If nobody has touched your services since setup and you want a second pass on what should be there, book a strategy call. It is an unglamorous half hour and it is the closest thing on the profile to telling Google exactly what you sell.