If you run a business in metro Detroit and you are not showing up in the little map with three results at the top of Google, this is almost always where the problem starts. Not your website. Not backlinks. Your Google Business Profile.
It is free, it takes about two hours to do properly, and roughly nine out of ten local businesses we audit have done maybe a third of it.
Here is the whole checklist.
1. Pick the right primary category
This is the single highest-leverage field in the entire profile, and it is the one people get wrong most often. Google uses your primary category to decide which searches you are even eligible to appear for.
"Contractor" is not the same as "HVAC contractor." "Doctor" is not "Pediatric dentist." Be as specific as the category list allows, then add secondary categories for everything else you genuinely do.
A quick way to check yourself: search your main service in an incognito window, click the top three map results, and look at what categories they use. If you are not in the same neighborhood as those, that is your gap.
2. Add every service, individually
There is a services section. Use it. List each service as its own entry with a real description — not a comma-separated dump in one field.
A furnace company should have separate entries for furnace repair, furnace installation, AC repair, AC installation, duct cleaning and maintenance plans. Each one is a phrase somebody types into Google.
3. Set your service area honestly
If you go to customers, set a service area and remove your street address. If customers come to you, keep the address and skip the service area. Doing both confuses the listing and can suppress it.
Do not list thirty cities. Google discounts absurdly wide service areas, and you will rank better claiming the eight suburbs you actually drive to than the whole Lower Peninsula.
4. Fill in the description with the words customers use
You get 750 characters. Write plainly about what you do and where you do it. Skip "we are a full-service provider of integrated solutions" — nobody searches that. Say "We repair and install furnaces and air conditioners for homeowners in Warren, Sterling Heights and the surrounding Macomb County suburbs."
5. Post photos, and keep posting them
Profiles with more photos get more clicks and more direction requests. Google has said as much, and every audit we run confirms it.
- Exterior shots so people recognize the building
- Interior shots if customers come inside
- Your team, your trucks, your equipment
- Actual work you have done, before and after
Add a few every month. Freshness matters more than volume.
6. Use Google Posts weekly
Posts are the most underused feature in the whole product. A short update once a week — a seasonal offer, a job you finished, a reminder to book before the first freeze — signals that the listing is active.
It takes five minutes. Almost nobody does it, which is exactly why it is worth doing.
7. Answer questions before customers ask them
The Q&A section is public and anyone can answer, including competitors and people who are simply wrong. Seed it yourself: post the eight questions you answer on the phone every week, then answer them from your business account.
8. Get reviews on a schedule, not in bursts
Review velocity — a steady trickle over time — moves local rankings more reliably than a pile of reviews all posted the same week, which looks manufactured.
Build the ask into your process. After the job is done and the customer is happy, send the link. A short text with a direct link converts far better than "leave us a review on Google" printed on an invoice.
Never buy reviews, never offer discounts for them. Google catches it, and the penalty is worse than having no reviews at all.
9. Reply to every review, especially the bad ones
Reply to all of them. Thank the good ones in one sentence. For the bad ones, respond calmly, publicly, and without arguing the facts — the reply is not for the angry customer, it is for the next hundred people who read it.
10. Make your name, address and phone identical everywhere
Google cross-references your details against other directories. If you are "Smith Heating & Cooling" on Google, "Smith Heating and Cooling LLC" on Yelp, and have an old phone number on a chamber of commerce page from years back, that inconsistency dilutes confidence in the listing.
Pick one exact format and make everything match it. This is tedious work. It is also the single clearest correlation we see between local businesses that rank and local businesses that do not.
11. Link to a page that actually matches the search
Your profile's website link should not always point at your homepage. If someone found you searching "furnace repair Warren," send them to your furnace repair page — not a homepage where they have to hunt.
This is where the profile and the website work together, and it is why service pages and city pages matter so much for local businesses. We wrote about how to build those in service-area pages that actually rank.
How long before it works
Profile changes tend to move faster than anything else in local SEO. We usually see the first movement inside two to six weeks — much quicker than the 60 to 90 days a full local SEO engagement typically takes to show real organic gains.
Which makes it the cheapest, fastest work available to a local business. Two hours, no budget, and most of your competitors have not bothered.
If you would rather not spend the afternoon on it, that setup is included in every website project we build, and managed monthly as part of our SEO work. Either way, do it — the map pack is where local customers start.
