What to write in your 750-character business description

Seven hundred and fifty characters is about a hundred and twenty words. Most businesses spend them on adjectives, and end up with a paragraph that describes every business in their trade equally well.

Before deciding what to write, it helps to be clear about who reads it, because it is not primarily the customer.

Who actually reads this field

A customer glancing at a map result mostly does not. They look at the rating, the review count, the photo and the distance, and they tap. The description is below the fold on a phone and behind a tap on the profile.

It is read carefully by two other things. By the customer who has already narrowed to two or three businesses and is now deciding, which is a small number of people at a very high-value moment. And by systems building a picture of what your business is, which increasingly includes assistants summarising you for someone who asked a question.

The rules, briefly

• 750 characters, and it is a hard limit.
• No links. They are stripped and their presence can hold the description in review.
• No offers, prices or promotional content. This is a description field, not an advert.
• Nothing misleading, which includes claims you cannot support.

The four things worth the characters

1. What you do, in the customer's words

Not your industry's word for it. If customers say blocked drain and you say drainage remediation, use theirs. This is the sentence that has to be unambiguous to a stranger and to a machine.

2. Where, and how far

The suburbs or region you genuinely work in. Not twenty of them. Four or five real ones does more than a list that reads as an attempt to cover everything.

3. The thing that separates you, stated as a fact

A licence. An accreditation. A specific capability. Years in one trade. Something a competitor could not copy into their own description truthfully.

This is where most descriptions fail, because they reach for quality, reliability and customer service, which are claims every competitor makes identically and which therefore carry no information.

4. What you do not do

The most under-used sentence available to you. Saying you do not do commercial work, or do not take jobs under a certain size, or only work on one brand, does three things at once: it filters out enquiries that waste your time, it makes the rest of the description more credible, and it is genuinely useful to a summary trying to describe you accurately.

A structure that works

Mill Road Plumbing is a licensed plumbing and gas
business working across Chermside, Kedron, Stafford
and the surrounding northside suburbs of Brisbane.

We handle blocked drains, burst pipes, hot water
system repair and replacement, and gas fitting.
Emergency callouts are answered 24 hours by the
plumber on call, not an answering service.

Licence 12345. Every job is quoted before work
starts and the price does not change afterwards.

We do not take on new construction or commercial
fitouts, and we do not subcontract. Jobs are done
by the two plumbers whose names are on the van.

Nothing in that paragraph is an adjective. Every sentence is checkable, and every sentence would become false if you pasted it onto a competitor's listing, which is the test worth applying.

Five phrases to delete on sight

• Committed to excellence. Says nothing, appears everywhere.
• We pride ourselves on. The single most common opening in this field.
• Your one-stop shop for all your needs. Ambiguous about what you do, which is the opposite of the job.
• Family owned and operated since [year], as an opening. Fine as a detail, weak as the first thing you say.
• Best in [town]. Unsupportable, and a claim that is not permitted as a factual statement.

If the sentence stays true when pasted onto your competitor's listing, it is not describing your business.

How often to change it

Rarely. Once it is accurate and specific, it is done. This is not a field that rewards seasonal rewrites, and editing your listing repeatedly for no reason is a small unnecessary risk.

Revisit it when something real changes: a new licence, a service you stopped offering, a change to your service area.

The description sits alongside the fields that do heavier lifting. Your category decides which searches you are eligible for, and if the reason you are writing this is that you are not appearing at all, start here instead. For where this field sits in the wider job, see the full local SEO checklist.