Getting found by homeowners who are already looking for you.
Every figure on this page is published research, credited where it sits. None of it is our own claim about results.
What it does for you.
Leads you don't pay per click for
An ad costs you every time somebody taps it, whether or not they call. A page that ranks brings the same homeowner in at no cost per visit, and it keeps doing it on the months you're too busy to think about marketing.
The three spots above the results
Local searches put a map and three businesses above everything else. That block is where a homeowner looking for a contractor in your town starts, and it's decided by different signals than the blue links under it.
Google's own criteria, worked deliberately
Google publishes what local rankings run on: relevance, distance and prominence. Two of the three are things you can act on, and most contractors act on neither.
It compounds instead of resetting
Ad performance starts from zero every month you fund it. Ranking, reviews and pages accumulate — the work you paid for in March is still working in December.
How Google decides who shows up.
This isn’t guesswork. Google publishes it: local results are based on relevance, distance and prominence.
Relevance
How well your profile and pages match what somebody typed. Google's guidance is to give it complete, detailed information.
What we do: Categories and services filled out properly, and a real page for each service in each area you work — not one page trying to rank for a kitchen remodel in one town and an addition in the next.
Distance
How far you are from the person searching. You can't move your yard, and neither can your competitors.
What we do: The one factor nobody can buy. It's why the service area, the pages behind each town and the profile's location settings have to be right — they're what decides which searches you're even eligible for.
Prominence
How well known the business is. Google names review count and links from other sites as inputs.
What we do: Reviews asked for at the moment a job finishes, responded to, and kept coming — plus the citations and content that give other sites a reason to point at you.
Source: Google Business Profile Help, “Tips to improve your local ranking on Google”.
What homeowners actually do first.
of consumers read reviews for local businesses.
BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (1,002 US adults)
won't use a business with fewer than 20 reviews.
BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026
only consider reviews from the last three months, so a profile that stopped collecting them reads as stale.
BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026
are more likely to use a business that responds to all of its reviews.
BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026
of general online searches happen on Google, and one in five local searches starts inside a maps app.
BrightLocal, Consumer Search Behavior, April 2025 (1,000 US consumers)
of the pages sitting in Google's top 10 are more than three years old. Ranking is slow to earn and slow to lose.
Ahrefs, study of 1.3M US keywords, September 2023
The fundamentals we run.
Google Business Profile
Categories, services, service area, hours and photos kept current, with posts going out regularly. It's the single biggest lever on map results and the one most often left untouched for a year.
Reviews
Asked for at the moment the homeowner is happiest, and every one answered. Google counts them toward prominence; the research above says homeowners count them too.
Pages that match real searches
A page per service, per area you actually serve, written for what a homeowner types rather than what the trade calls it.
On-page and technical
Titles, headings, internal links, local schema, image weight and Core Web Vitals. Unglamorous, and the reason a good page fails to rank when it's missing.
Content that answers the question
Blogs and guides on what a job costs, how long it takes and what goes wrong — the searches that happen months before anyone's ready to call.
Measurement
Search Console, Maps insights and call tracking, reported monthly, so you can see what moved rather than take our word for it.
How long it takes.
Google’s own guidance is four months to a year from the changes going in to the benefit showing up. A poll of 3,680 people who do this for a living puts the typical case at three to six months. Anyone promising you page one in thirty days is either bidding on ads or lying.
The profile work moves first, because map results respond faster than blue links. Pages and content are the long half. That’s the honest shape of it, and it’s why this is $250/mo rather than a project fee.
Sources: Google Search Central, “What is an SEO expert?”; Ahrefs, poll of 3,680 SEOs.
Want to know where you stand?
Fifteen minutes. We'll look at your profile, your rankings and the contractors currently above you, and tell you what's actually in the way.
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