Search for a local service on a phone and Google puts a map with three businesses above the regular results. This page is about getting into that map: what Google weighs, what you can influence, and what nobody can honestly promise you.
Search "plumber near me" in Wichita Falls and Google shows a map with three businesses above the regular website listings. That box is the map pack, and it is drawn from Google Business Profiles. If your profile is thin or miscategorized, you are not in it, however good your site is.
Three businesses get shown. Everyone else sits below the fold, under the ads and the directory sites.
Hours, directions and a call button sit inside the listing itself, so a search can end in a ringing phone without your website ever loading.
Google reads your website to work out what the profile is about. Profile gets you seen, site gets you chosen — a weak site caps how far the profile goes.
Google ranks local results on three things. Two you can work on, one you cannot, and knowing which is which saves a lot of wasted money.
How close you are to the person searching. You cannot change it without moving, and it is why your ranking differs from one side of town to the other.
How well your profile and pages match what was typed. The fastest thing to fix, and the one most often left half done.
How well known Google thinks you are. Slowest to move, hardest to fake, and the one that compounds.
Claiming the profile is step zero. These are the parts that change what happens next.
The biggest relevance lever on the profile, and it is one dropdown. Pick the category for what you mostly do, then add secondary ones for the rest. "Contractor" when you are an HVAC contractor costs you searches every week.
List the towns you really serve — Wichita Falls, Burkburnett, Iowa Park, Electra, Henrietta, Vernon, Graham, sometimes Lawton. Padding the list with places you will not drive to does not help you rank in them.
Your truck, your crew, the storefront, finished work, added every month. Four stock photos from the day you claimed the listing read as a business that may not be open.
A short post every couple of weeks, and answers to the questions people ask. You can post the questions yourself and answer them. It costs nothing and keeps the listing alive.
Reviews feed prominence, and the count and the rating sit next to your name while someone picks between the three listings. If you do good work and still have a handful of reviews, it is usually because asking feels awkward. It does not have to be.
Right after the job is done and the customer is relieved. Not a week later by email. One sentence, out loud, in person.
Text the review link the same day. Nobody searches out your business to leave a review from memory.
Good and bad. A calm reply to a bad review sells better to the next reader than the five-star ones above it.
No incentives, no filtering out the customers you expect to complain, no bundles off the internet. It breaks Google's rules and gets profiles suspended.
If asking every time is the part that never happens, automate it. Review requests that go out on their own after a job are part of our AI lead management setup.
None of it is exciting and all of it is checkable, which is the point.
Name, address and phone written the same way everywhere, and the strays cleaned up — old listings from a previous owner, duplicate profiles, a Yelp page nobody claimed.
One title tag and one H1 per page, naming the service and the town. Oldest advice in SEO, still got wrong constantly.
LocalBusiness markup so your details are machine-readable, and links between your pages so Google sees how the site fits together.
All of it is set up as part of every website we build, and the same markup goes on ecommerce stores. It is not a separate product.
A homepage listing eight services mentions each one once. There is nothing for Google to match a specific search against, so it ranks properly for none of them.
A page that is only about drain cleaning — title, heading and several paragraphs answering what people ask about drain cleaning — has something to match. Same for each town you serve, which is the idea behind separate service area pages.
Not us, not the agency that cold-called you. Results change by where the searcher is standing and what device they are on, so there is no single number one that everybody sees. Anyone promising it is selling something, usually with a long contract attached.
What can be promised is the work: profile set up properly, pages written, citations cleaned up, reviews asked for, and a plain-language account each month of what changed. Local SEO is part of the $249/month Growth plan — full pricing is on the home page — month to month, cancel on 30 days notice.
One call and you will know what is wrong with your listing and what it would take to fix. No charge, and no pitch if there is nothing to fix. We reply within one business day.