Someone a couple of miles from you just typed “plumber near me” into their phone. They will look at three businesses on a map, glance at the stars, and call one. They will not scroll far, and they will not go to page two.
Whether you are one of those three has little to do with ads and less than you’d think to do with your website. Mostly it comes down to a free listing you may never have finished filling in.
The map comes before the website
For a search with local intent, Google usually shows a map and a short list of businesses above the ordinary results. That list is drawn from Google Business Profile, the free listing Google keeps for every business it knows about. If you have never claimed yours, Google may have built one anyway from whatever it found, and anyone can suggest edits to it, including your opening hours.
Google publishes how it ranks those listings, in the Business Profile help pages. It names three things:
- Relevance: how well your profile matches what the person searched for.
- Distance: how far you are from them, or from the place they named.
- Prominence: how well known you are, which includes your reviews and what the rest of the web says about you.
You can’t move your shop. Relevance and prominence you can do a lot about, and most of it is free. Plenty of businesses leave it half done, which is your opening.
Google Business Profile, filled in properly
Claim or create your profile at google.com/business. Google will make you verify that you are really the business, by video, phone, text, or a postcard depending on what it decides. It can take a few days. Do it anyway; nothing else in this article matters as much.
Then go through it section by section. Not the minimum. All of it.
Your primary category is the most important choice on the profile. It tells Google what you are. Pick the most specific one that is true. A yoga studio is “Yoga studio”, not “Gym”. A bakery that mostly does wedding cakes should look for “Wedding bakery” before settling for “Bakery”. Add secondary categories only for things you genuinely do. A good way to check: look up the businesses that already show up on the map for your main search. Their primary category is shown right under their name.
Your business name is your real name. Not “Mesa Plumbing | 24 Hour Emergency Plumber Mesa AZ”. Stuffing keywords into the name breaks Google’s guidelines, a competitor can report it, and the penalty can be your listing going dark. It works for some people for a while, which is why you see it. It is not worth the risk to a business that depends on the phone ringing.
Hours, including holiday hours. Every federal holiday, set special hours or mark yourself closed. A listing that says “Open” while you’re closed sends someone to a locked door, and they will write about it.
Services, with the words your customers use. There is a services section and, for some categories, a products section. Fill it in plainly: “Water heater replacement”, “Drain cleaning”, “Gas line repair”. Add prices or price ranges if you can live with them being public. People who already know your price call ready to book.
The description. Say what you do, where, and for whom, in the words a customer would use. Leave out the adjectives.
Before: Delivering excellence in residential and commercial plumbing solutions since 2009.
After: Family-run plumbers in Mesa and Gilbert since 2009. Water heaters, leaks, drains and repiping for homes and small businesses. Same-day service on weekdays.
Photos that are actually yours. The front of the building, so people recognize it from the street. The inside. You and your staff. The work: a finished kitchen, a tray of croissants, a full class. Phone photos are fine; stock photos are worse than none, because people can tell. Add a few new ones now and then, and check the photos customers have added, since those show up too.
Attributes. Depending on your category, Google offers checkboxes for things like a wheelchair-accessible entrance, restrooms, payment methods, women-owned or veteran-owned. They take two minutes. Some of them are filters people search by, and a customer in a wheelchair should not have to phone to find out about your step.
Posts. You can publish short updates: a seasonal offer, an event, new hours. Google has not said these help your ranking, and I would not do them for that reason. Do them because the person already looking at your profile can see you are open and paying attention. Once a month is plenty.
Questions. Google has been reworking the questions section of profiles, and it may not appear on yours. If it does, know that anyone can ask, anyone can answer, and strangers sometimes answer wrongly. Ask and answer your own common questions there, and watch it. Either way, the questions don’t go away. Put the answers in your description, your services, and on your website, because that is where Google and everyone else will look for them.
Reviews decide who gets the call
Reviews do two jobs. Google’s own help page says that review count and score factor into local ranking. And once you show up, reviews are how a stranger decides between you and the business next to you on the map. They will read the recent ones, and they will read the bad ones.
Most happy customers never think to leave a review. Ask them, at the moment they’re happiest: when the job’s finished, when they pick up the cake, after the class they said they loved. Your profile can give you a short review link and a QR code. Send it the same day, in a text, with no pressure:
Hi Maria, it’s Dan from Mesa Plumbing. Thanks for today. If you have a minute, a Google review helps a small business like ours more than you’d think: [link]. No worries if not.
That’s the whole system. A steady trickle of honest reviews beats a burst of twenty in one week.
What you must not do, because it can cost you the listing and in some cases break the law:
- Don’t offer anything for a review. No discount, no entry into a draw. Google’s rules forbid it, whether or not the review is positive.
- Don’t ask only the happy ones. Sending some customers to Google and quietly steering the unhappy ones to a private form is called review gating, and Google prohibits it.
- Don’t buy reviews, write your own, or swap with other businesses. The FTC’s rule on fake reviews and testimonials, in force since October 2024, lets it fine businesses that buy or sell fake reviews.
Reply to every review, the bad ones especially. The reply is not for the angry customer. It is for the next fifty people who read it. Be brief, don’t argue the details in public, and offer a way to fix it.
Sorry we got this wrong. You should have had a call when the tech was running late, and you didn’t. I’d like to make it right; please call me directly at (480) 555-0142. — Dan, owner
If you work in health care, therapy or anything similar, do not confirm in a reply that the reviewer was your client or patient. Thank them and invite them to contact you privately.
Say your name, address and phone the same way everywhere
Your business details live in dozens of places you didn’t put them: Yelp, Facebook, Apple Maps, Bing, the chamber of commerce, industry directories, old listings from data brokers. Every service that shows business information is trying to work out which facts are true. When the sources agree, that’s easy. When one says Suite 4 and another says Unit 4B and a third has the phone number you dropped in 2019, any of those might end up in front of a customer.
Pick one exact version of your name, address and phone number and use it everywhere. Then find the places that disagree.
Do this now, ten minutes: search Google for your business name with your old phone number, and then with your old address if you’ve ever moved. Every result is a listing a customer might find and call. Make a list, then fix the biggest ones: Yelp, Facebook, Apple Business Connect (Apple Maps), Bing Places, and the one or two directories that matter in your trade. Apple’s and Bing’s listings are free, take a few minutes, and are used by things you don’t think of: Siri, iPhone maps, car dashboards.
If you use a call-tracking service that gives you different numbers for different places, be careful. It can be done well, but done carelessly it scatters a dozen phone numbers across the web, and the old ones stop working when you cancel.
If your business comes to the customer (a plumber, a mobile groomer, a cleaner), you can hide your home address on your profile and set a service area instead. Do that rather than renting a mailbox to look like a storefront, which Google’s guidelines don’t allow.
A website Google can read
Your profile has a website field. What’s at the other end of it matters, both for ranking and because someone who taps it has nearly decided. The site doesn’t need to be clever. It needs to say plainly, in text, what you do and where.
Every page gets its own title. It’s the blue link text in search results, and it’s set in the page’s code, not the visible heading. Plenty of small sites have “Home” as the title of every page.
Before: Home
After: Plumber in Mesa & Gilbert, AZ | Mesa Plumbing
One clear heading at the top of each page, saying what the page is about. Then smaller headings for the sections under it. Google uses those headings to understand the page, and a screen reader uses the same structure to let a blind visitor jump around it. Same work, two jobs.
A page for each service you want to be found for. If you do drain cleaning, water heaters and repiping, each gets its own page, with what it involves, roughly what it costs, how long it takes, and the questions people ask you about it on the phone. A single “Services” page with a bulleted list gives Google almost nothing to match a search against.
A page for each area, only if you have something real to say about it. A page for Gilbert that’s honest about your work there, the jobs you’ve done, the neighborhoods you cover and the response time, is useful. Twenty city pages with the town name swapped are what Google calls doorway pages, and its spam policies name them specifically. Write fewer, better ones.
Your phone number and address as real text. Not inside an image, and not only in the footer graphic. Make the phone number a tap-to-call link, because most of your visitors are on a phone.
Fast, and readable on a phone. If a page takes ages to appear on a phone, people go back and tap the next business. Google measures that too.
There’s also structured data, a few lines of code that state your hours, address and prices in a format machines read without guessing. It’s worth having; it also matters more as AI assistants answer local questions, which is a subject on its own.
What to ignore
A lot of money in local search goes to things that don’t work, and the people selling them are good at sounding technical.
- Anyone who guarantees first place on Google. Nobody can. Google says so on its own page about hiring an SEO.
- Calls claiming to be from Google about your listing or your ranking. Google doesn’t phone businesses to sell them a ranking. Hang up.
- “We’ll submit you to 500 directories.” You need to be correct on the handful that matter, not present on hundreds nobody visits. Mass submissions often create the inconsistent listings you then have to clean up.
- Monthly backlink packages. Links from junk sites built for the purpose are against Google’s spam policies. At best they do nothing.
- Four blog posts a month, written for keywords. A bakery doesn’t need “10 Fun Facts About Sourdough”. It needs a page that says what it bakes, when it’s open, and how to order a cake.
- Rank reports that show you at number one. Local results change with where the searcher is standing. You’ll rank better searching from your own shop than a customer across town does, so a single number means little.
There is honest help in this field, and it looks like someone who fills in your profile with you, fixes your listings, rewrites your service pages, and tells you plainly what they did. If a package can’t tell you what it will actually do this month, don’t buy it.
Your first hour
Do these in order. Stop wherever the hour runs out and pick it up next week.
- Claim or log in to your Google Business Profile and start verification if needed.
- Check the name is your real name and the primary category is the most specific true one.
- Set your hours, and add holiday hours for the rest of the year.
- Fill in services with the words customers use, with prices if you’re willing.
- Rewrite the description: what you do, where, for whom. No adjectives.
- Add five real photos: outside, inside, people, two of your work.
- Tick the attributes that apply, accessibility ones first.
- Copy your review link and send it to three recent happy customers.
- Reply to any reviews you haven’t replied to.
- Search your old phone number and old address, and write down every listing that’s wrong.
It’s slow, and it compounds
None of this produces a spike. You won’t fill in your profile on Monday and see the phone ring on Tuesday. What happens is slower: a complete, accurate profile, a steady drip of real reviews, a site that says plainly what you do, and over a few months you show up for more searches, and the people who find you have fewer reasons to pick someone else.
It’s also not a one-time job. Hours change, you add a service, a review comes in at eleven at night. Put fifteen minutes on the calendar once a month to look at your profile the way a customer does. That’s the whole maintenance plan, and it costs nothing but the fifteen minutes.