Categories, service areas, photos, questions and posts — set up properly once, then kept current.
For a local service business the Google Business Profile often outranks the website, because the map pack sits above everything else on a phone. A profile with the wrong primary category, no photos and three unanswered questions is losing calls to a competitor who filled theirs in.
Metcalf Media sets the profile up against the services that actually make money, matches the service area to the towns being targeted, and keeps it current instead of filling it in once and forgetting it.
A radius drawn around a Tulsa shop crosses four counties and takes in towns a crew will never drive to. The metro is seven counties and roughly a million people, and the towns inside it behave nothing alike — Catoosa's sales tax collections rose 25.3% year on year while Sapulpa's fell 7.5%.
Metcalf Media sets service areas to the towns a business actually wants work in, which is a different list from the towns inside a circle.
Audit the current profile, the categories and what competitors in the map pack are doing.
Rebuild the profile properly: categories, areas, services, photos, questions.
Post, answer, add photos, and report the calls and direction requests it produced.
For the first impression, often yes — the map pack sits above the blue links on a phone, so many customers never scroll past it. Metcalf Media treats the profile and the website as one job, because the profile earns the click and the website has to be worth the click when it arrives.
If customers come to you, use the address; if you go to them, use a service area and hide the address. Metcalf Media always hides the address for a business run out of a home, because publishing a home address is both a safety issue and a violation of Google's own guidelines for service-area businesses.
More than most businesses have, and real ones. Metcalf Media adds photographs of actual crews, trucks and finished work rather than stock images, because a customer comparing three profiles on a phone is looking for evidence the business exists and stock photography reads instantly as the opposite.
It's harder but it's normal, and it's what service-area businesses do every day. Metcalf Media supports it with a real page for that town on the website, which gives the search engine something to associate the business with beyond the profile itself.
Monthly at minimum, and immediately whenever hours, services or the service area change. Metcalf Media keeps profiles current as part of ongoing work rather than treating setup as a one-off, because a profile that hasn't moved in a year reads as a business that may not still be open.
The same service runs differently depending on how the trade actually buys.
Each of these makes the others worth more. That's the whole argument for running them together.
Ranking in the towns you actually serve, for the jobs you actually want.
Local SEOA system that asks every happy customer, at the moment they're happiest.
ReviewsFound by the people already searching for the job you do, in the town you do it in.
WebsitesYou'll know either way — including if the honest answer is that something else should come first.
