How GBP products and services work
A Google Business Profile has two places to describe what you sell. The services list holds named offerings, each with an optional description, grouped under the categories you have chosen; Google suggests common ones for your category and lets you add your own. The products section is more visual — a name, a photo, a price or price range and a short description — and each item can link to a page on your site where it is bought or enquired about.
Both appear on the profile itself, in the panel people see beside the map or when they tap your listing. Google also reads the service names when working out which searches your listing is relevant to, and uses them to build the short explanatory labels that sometimes sit beneath a result saying the business provides a particular thing.
Why they matter
They answer the question that decides the call: do you do the thing I need? A profile with a category and nothing else makes the searcher guess, and many will move on to the listing that spells it out. Filling the section in also gives Google more to match against, which helps for work sitting inside a broad category — a garage that lists wheel alignment separately is easier to match than one described only as an auto repair shop.
The products section carries extra weight where price is the real barrier. Publishing a price or a range filters out enquiries you were never going to win, and reassures the people who quietly assumed you would be out of reach.
Common mistakes with products and services
Stuffing keywords into service names is the first. The list is there to name what you sell, and entries that read as search phrases rather than services tend to be removed. Listing work you do not actually offer is the second: it produces enquiries you have to refuse and reviews from people who feel misled.
The third is treating the section as decoration, leaving every description blank so the profile shows a bare column of nouns. The fourth is letting prices go stale — a genuine risk anywhere costs move quickly, and an out-of-date price on a public listing is an argument waiting to happen.
What to do about it
Start from how customers describe what they want, not from your internal service names. List the offerings that actually bring in work, write one honest sentence for each explaining what is included, and link products to the matching page on your site so the visitor lands somewhere that answers their next question. Keep the list short enough that somebody reads it.
Revisit it whenever your prices or your offer change, and check the profile after Google’s own updates, because suggested entries sometimes appear on their own. The list works alongside categories, photos and posts, all of which sit under Google Business Profile optimisation.