This is the full checklist we work through with clients, in order. Nothing here requires an agency. It requires doing all of it and then continuing to do it.
Everything here is what we do for clients. If you use it yourself and never call, that is a good outcome.
Search your main service plus your city in an incognito window and note who appears in the map pack. Those are your real competitors, not the ones you think about.
Open each competitor's Google Business Profile and record their primary category, number of listed services, photo count, total reviews, and the date of their most recent review. Put yours in the same table. The gaps are your plan.
Search your business name plus your phone number and find every listing that exists, including the ones with the old address. Make a list.
Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights on mobile and note the score, then check whether your body copy appears in View Page Source.
Choose the most specific primary category that describes what you do. This single field carries more weight than almost anything else you control, and generic choices lose to precise ones.
Add every service with a real description rather than leaving the section empty.
Set hours that reflect when you can genuinely respond. Being open at the moment of search has become one of the strongest map-pack factors.
Upload at least fifteen genuine photos of your location, team, and work, and keep adding them monthly.
Fill in attributes, add your service areas if you travel to customers, and write out the Q&A section with the questions customers actually ask.
Post to the profile weekly. It takes minutes and it is a ranking surface you fully control.
Decide the single exact format of your business name, address, and phone. Write it down. Never deviate from it.
Claim and correct the core listings: Google, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Yelp, Foursquare, Facebook, and the Better Business Bureau.
Add the directories specific to your industry, which usually matter more than another general listing.
Find and either claim or request removal of duplicate listings, which compete with your real one and split your signals.
Create one page per service. A homepage listing everything ranks for nothing.
Create one page per city you genuinely serve, each with content that only applies to that city. Near-duplicate location pages are classified as doorway pages and can get the whole set deindexed.
Put your exact name, address, and phone in the footer of every page and add LocalBusiness schema.
Add FAQ schema to your service pages using questions customers actually ask.
Link your pages together so authority flows from the homepage outward, and submit a sitemap through Search Console.
Ask in person or by text, from the person who did the work, at the moment the customer is happiest. One tap to leave it.
Aim for a consistent weekly flow rather than occasional bursts. Velocity and recency outweigh a large stale total.
Respond to every review within a business day, including the negative ones. Response rate is both a ranking factor and the thing your next customer reads.
Never buy reviews. Detection is good, suspensions are real, and recovery takes weeks.
Join your chamber and actually use the listing. In Palm Beach and Martin County these carry genuine local weight.
Sponsor something local that publishes a sponsor page. A youth team, a charity run, a school event.
Ask your suppliers, partners, and the businesses you refer to for a listing on their site.
Pitch local press when you have something real: an expansion, a hire, a community project, or original data about your market.
Track rankings on a geographic grid rather than a single number, because a single number hides that you rank well near your office and poorly a few miles away.
Track calls, direction requests, and form submissions, not just positions. Rankings are the means.
Re-run your competitor audit quarterly. The field moves.
Expect 30 to 60 days for profile-driven movement and four to six months for competitive categories. The businesses that win are the ones still doing this in month nine.
The profile and citation work is a focused week. The website pages take longer depending on how many services and cities you have. Reviews and mentions never finish, which is the point.
Yes. Most of it is time and consistency rather than expertise. The reason businesses hire agencies is that the work never stops, not that it is secret.
Your Google Business Profile primary category, followed by review velocity. If you only do two things, do those.
Calls and form submissions before rankings. Rankings move slowly and unevenly; the phone tells you sooner.
The same checklist, executed for longer. Expect six to twelve months rather than four, and expect to need more content depth and more reviews than a less contested market demands.
Free 30-minute strategy call. We'll run your category live and show you exactly where you stand.