Be one of the three businesses on the map

You've been at this twenty years. Your work is clean, your trucks are lettered, and half your jobs come from people who already know your name. Then you sit at the kitchen table, type your trade and your town into your own phone, and three businesses come up in a box at the top with the little map over it. One of them you've never heard of. One of them you've had to go behind and fix. You're not in the box.

Somebody's nephew set your listing up years ago. It says your trade and almost nothing else. Wrong hours, four photos, a number you stopped using.

The last outfit you paid sent a PDF every month with the graphs going up — impressions, average position, six pages of it — and not one line saying how many people picked up the phone. You asked. The next month's report was longer.

Every one of those searches was a job. It didn't go nowhere. It went to the guy in the box.

Three things decide who lands in that box. How close you are to the man doing the searching. How finished your listing is and how often it moves. And what people say about you, and how lately they said it. I can't move your shop. The other two are work, and here's the work.

• Your main category and the extra ones set to the jobs you actually want, not "contractor."
• Every service written out, and your service area drawn to the towns you actually drive to.
• Real hours, holiday hours, the phone you answer — and duplicate listings shut down so Google stops splitting you in two.
• Your name, address and phone made to match everywhere Google cross-checks them, because when they disagree Google trusts you less.
• Photos off real jobs and a post every week, plus the questions you answer on the phone all day put in the listing with the answers under them.
• Review requests that go out on their own when a job closes, instead of three weeks later when he's forgotten your name.

That's the whole trick. A list, run every week, by somebody whose job it is.

I can't move your shop. If a man is standing twenty miles out in a town where three guys in your trade are two blocks from him, you are not going to be in his three. Nobody can sell you that. What I can work on is the towns you actually drive to and the searches happening inside them. That's where your jobs are, and that's where they're leaking out.

And if you already come up in your own town, and your real problem is that you've got eleven reviews while the guy above you has two hundred, don't buy the map package. Buy the review one at $199 a month and give it ninety days. It's less money and it's the thing holding you back. I'd rather sell you the small thing that works.

Type whatever you'd type to find a company that does this kind of work in Libertyville. Then Mundelein. See where we come out. I'm not printing a number here — numbers move, and anybody can screenshot a good day. Check Vernon Hills too. That's our hometown and we're still climbing there, and I'd rather tell you that than have you catch it. When a guy says he's number one everywhere, you know what he is.

A pressure washing outfit in Tamarac, Florida came to us with no website and nothing on Google. A quarter later he was coming up in the local results in his area and taking calls off Google. A plumber in Wheeling started with us this month. I can't tell you what it did for him yet — four weeks isn't a result, it's a screenshot. Ask me in the fall.

You don't have to hire anybody to find out where you stand. There's a free scan on this site that runs in about thirty seconds and needs no call. If you want the whole picture — every place a customer can look, including what ChatGPT says when somebody asks it for a plumber — that's the $497 audit: twenty-five-plus checks run by hand, a map of where your competitors are ahead of you, and forty-five minutes on the phone walking you through it. Credited back in full when you sign up. If you don't sign up, the teardown is still yours.