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Local SEO

Local SEO
for Michigan Businesses.

Getting found when someone three miles away searches for what you sell. It is a build first and maintenance after, not a subscription you rent forever.

Included from Foundation, $5,000 build and $500 a month. First rankings movement at 60 to 90 days. Full pricing and what is included

Book a Call
Or do it yourself, free

Next available build start date is Sept. 28, 2026

What local SEO actually is

Three things decide whether you show up in the map pack. That is it. They are not equal, and only one of them is worth paying anybody for.

  • Relevance

    Does Google understand what you sell and where? Profile categories, your services, the structure of your site, and schema markup that spells it out in a language a machine reads.

    Who controls itYou, once

  • Distance

    How far you are from the person searching. Anyone charging you to fix it is charging you for weather.

    Who controls itNobody

  • Prominence

    How well known you are. Reviews, citations, links, mentions, and how consistently your name, address and phone number appear across the internet. It is the one most agencies quietly skip.

    Who controls itEarned, monthly

Notice what is not on that list.

Blog posts about “5 Tips for Choosing a Roofer,” keyword density, meta keywords, or a monthly report full of impressions.

Local SEO is a build, then maintenance. If someone is charging you $1,500 a month indefinitely and cannot show you what changed this month, you are renting a report.

Do this yourself, this week, for free

This is the part most of what an agency charges you for. We are going to hand you the whole thing, because if you do it and it works, good, and if you do it and want the rest, you will know exactly why the rest costs money.

Block out one afternoon. Genuinely one afternoon. Twenty-five things, four of them, and in our experience this alone outperforms a new website for a local business more often than anyone selling websites likes to admit.

  1. Claim and finish your Google Business Profile

    Not claim it. Finish it. An incomplete profile is the single most common reason a business that should rank does not.

    10 things to do
    • Verify it. Do the postcard or the video, whatever they ask for.
    • Set your primary category to the most specific one that fits. Roofing contractor, not contractor. This one field does more than the next ten combined.
    • Add every relevant secondary category. Not fifteen, the three or four you genuinely do.
    • Fill in every service with a real description. Most businesses list four. List all of them.
    • Set your service area honestly, by city. If you do not go to Novi, do not list Novi.
    • Set hours, including holiday hours. Google demotes profiles it thinks are stale.
    • Tick every attribute that applies. Veteran-owned, women-owned, free estimates, wheelchair accessible. These become filters people search by.
    • Add ten or more real photos, geotagged if you can, taken on a phone at real jobs. Not stock.
    • Turn on messaging only if you will actually answer it. A slow reply hurts more than no messaging.
    • Publish a Google Post once a week. Ninety seconds each. A job you finished, a season reminder, an offer.

  2. Ask every finished customer for a review, the same day

    Nothing else on this page moves you up as fast, and almost nobody does it systematically.

    5 things to do
    • Get your review link from your profile. Shorten it. Save it as a text shortcut on your phone.
    • Ask in person first, at the moment they are happiest, the job is done and they are pleased. Then text the link before you leave the driveway.
    • Ask by name. Would you mind leaving us a review converts at a fraction of Hey Dave, glad the roof came out well, two minutes if you get a chance?
    • Reply to every review, good and bad, within a day. Use the service and the city in the reply naturally. Google reads them.
    • A bad review is not a crisis. An unanswered bad review is. A calm, specific, non-defensive reply sells better than the five stars above it.

  3. Fix your NAP everywhere it already exists

    Name, address, phone. Pick the exact format you will use forever, Suite 4 or Ste 4, and make everything match it character for character.

    5 things to do
    • Google your business name plus your phone number. Every result showing an old address or a disconnected number is costing you.
    • Fix the free ones first: Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Facebook, Yelp, Better Business Bureau, Nextdoor, Angi, Yellow Pages.
    • Add the industry ones. Every trade has three or four that matter and you already know what they are.
    • Put the same NAP in the footer of every page of your website, in text, not in an image.
    • Kill duplicates. Two profiles for one business split your signals, and one of them is usually the one ranking.

  4. Test the thing everyone forgets

    Four of these take five minutes each, and one of them finds a broken form on a site that has been live for years.

    5 things to do
    • Open your own website on your phone, on cell data, not wifi. Count the seconds. Over three and you are losing people before the page loads.
    • Fill in your own contact form. Do it right now. A shocking share of the sites we audit have a form that silently fails, and the owner has no idea.
    • Call your own tracking number, if you have one. Text it too.
    • Check that your phone number is a tappable link on mobile, not typed text.
    • Search your own service plus your city in an incognito window. Look at who is above you and what their profile has that yours does not.

Twenty real reviews with real replies beats a $1,500-a-month SEO retainer in most Oakland County markets. That is not a slogan. It is just what the ranking factors weight.

Why we would publish all of that. Because it is true, because you can verify it, and because the businesses that do it and then call us are the best clients we get. They already understand what the work is. The ones who read it and hire someone cheaper were never going to buy from us anyway. We would rather be the shop that told you.

Five questions to ask any SEO company before you pay them

Including us. Especially us. If a shop cannot answer these in plain language on a first call, that is your answer.

  1. What exactly will you do in month three?
    Good answer

    A specific list. Twelve more citations, two service-area pages, review responses, rank check, and the report. Boring and checkable.

    Run if you hear

    Ongoing optimization, content strategy, or anything that could describe forty different activities. Month three is where retainers quietly become nothing.

  2. Can you guarantee me a ranking?
    Good answer

    No. Nobody can, and the honest shops say so immediately, then tell you what they will commit to: the work, which is checkable, rather than the outcome, which is not.

    Run if you hear

    Page one in 90 days or your money back. Either they are lying, or they are about to rank you for a term nobody searches so they can technically deliver it.

  3. Who owns the Google Business Profile when we are done?
    Good answer

    You do, always. They take manager access via an invite link.

    Run if you hear

    Anything involving them creating it under their own account, or asking for your Google password. A profile you do not own is a hostage. This is the most common way a small business gets trapped, and the costliest to undo.

  4. What is in the monthly report?
    Good answer

    Leads, where they came from, and what they were worth. Calls, forms, chats, all tied to a source.

    Run if you hear

    Impressions, sessions, keyword positions with no lead data attached, or a 30-page PDF from a tool with their logo on it. You cannot act on any of that, which is rather the point.

  5. Show me a client in my industry, and let me call them.
    Good answer

    Yes, here is a name and a number.

    Run if you hear

    We cannot share that for confidentiality reasons, on a local service business. A roofer in Clarkston is not a state secret. If nobody will vouch on the phone, ask yourself why.

Ask us all five on the call.

The answers are: a specific list you will get in writing; no, and here is what we commit to instead; you do, via a manager invite; leads, sources and value; and yes, once we have clients in your industry, which for some industries we do not yet, and we will tell you that rather than dress up a different one.

What we do that you cannot do in an afternoon

Everything in the free section above is genuinely worth doing and genuinely free. Here is where paying someone starts to make sense.

Once, in the first 6 weeks

  • NAP audit and reconciliation

    Finding every listing that already exists, including the ones you did not create, and fixing or killing them. Tedious, unglamorous, and the highest-value hour in local SEO.

  • Citations built by hand

    10 to 12 core directories on Foundation, done properly rather than blasted by a submission tool that creates duplicates you will pay to clean up later.

  • Real service-area pages

    Genuinely different content per city, not one template with the city name swapped. More work, and the entire reason it holds.

  • Schema markup

    LocalBusiness, Service, FAQ, tied to your real categories and areas. How you tell Google what you are in a language it does not have to guess at.

  • Site structure

    Services and locations separated properly, so each page can rank for one thing rather than all of them competing.

  • Speed

    98+ desktop, 90+ mobile, budgeted before design starts. Slow sites do not rank and do not convert, in that order.

Every month after, for as long as you want it to hold

  • Citation monitoring, because listings change and aggregators re-publish old data
  • Google Posts and profile freshness
  • Review monitoring and response support
  • Rank tracking on the terms that produce work
  • The monthly report: leads, sources, and what they were worth

The unglamorous truth.

Most of local SEO is maintenance and consistency, not cleverness. The reason it works is that almost nobody does it every month for a year. That is the whole moat, and it is why we would happily publish the playbook above.

What it costs

Local SEO is not sold separately here, because selling it separately means selling it onto a site that cannot convert the traffic, which is how people end up paying for rankings that produce nothing.

  • Lead Engine

    Presence

    $2,500buildthen $250 a month

    • Profile set up properly, not just claimed
    • Basic schema and clean indexing
    • No citation work, no monthly SEO

    In shortA foundation, not a campaign.

  • Lead Engine

    Foundation

    $5,000buildthen $500 a month

    • Profile fully optimized, every field
    • NAP audit plus 10 to 12 citations by hand
    • Real service-area pages and full schema
    • Worked every month, reported monthly

    In shortThen worked every month.

  • Lead Engine

    Growth

    $12,000buildthen $1,000 a month plus 20% of spend

    • Everything in Foundation, every month
    • Paid traffic on top of the organic base
    • Lead scoring and routing on what comes in

    In shortVolume, once it converts.

For local SEO specifically, Foundation is the line.

Presence gets the profile right and stops there, which is the correct buy if you are going to work the free playbook above yourself. Foundation is where the citation work, the service-area pages and the monthly maintenance start, and that is what actually moves the map pack.

Every difference, side by side

What we will not do

Six things other shops will sell you. Every one of them is a liability with an invoice attached.

  • Guarantee a ranking by a date

    Nobody can. Anyone who does is either lying or about to get you penalized.

  • Build 200 doorway pages

    Near-identical city pages are a 2014 tactic with a 2026 penalty attached. We build the service-area pages that earn their place and stop.

  • Buy, incentivize or write your reviews

    It violates Google’s terms, it is illegal under FTC rules, and it is the fastest way to lose a profile you spent years building.

  • Report impressions as results

    If we cannot tie it to a lead, it does not go in your report.

  • Take ownership of your profile

    Manager access, always. You stay the owner.

  • Sell you local SEO when the answer is a working contact form

    It happens more than you would think, and we would rather fix the cheap thing.

  • None of those? Then local search will pay you back.

    A real service area, work you want more of, and the patience for a build plus maintenance.

Where we work

We are in Waterford. Most of what we build is for Oakland County and Metro Detroit, and the linked towns have a page on what local search actually looks like there.

Outside Michigan?

The map pack ranks your address, not ours. Everything on this page is done from a keyboard, and we build for businesses out of state regularly. Distance is not the filter, fit is.

Straight answers

How long until I rank?

Expect movement at 60 to 90 days and real results past that. Local SEO compounds, profile changes and review velocity show up fastest, citations take a cycle to propagate, and service-area pages need to be indexed and then earn their position. Anyone quoting you a date is guessing, and anyone quoting you a date in writing is guessing with your money.

Can I buy just the local SEO without the website?

No, and it is not a sales tactic. Local SEO sends people to a page. If that page is slow, unclear or has a form that does not work, you are paying to deliver traffic to a leak. We would rather build the container first, which is why it is bundled from Foundation up.

What if I already have a decent website?

Then say so on the call and we will look at it honestly. If the bones are sound, improving speed, structure, tracking and conversion on what you have is cheaper and faster than a rebuild, and we will tell you that even though it pays us less.

How many citations do I actually need?

Fewer than anyone selling citation packages wants you to believe. Ten to twelve accurate, consistent listings on directories that matter in your trade beats 200 auto-submitted ones, which mostly create duplicates that later cost money to clean up. Consistency is the ranking factor, not volume.

Do I need to keep paying after the build?

The build is the build. The monthly is maintenance, and local SEO genuinely does decay, listings change, aggregators republish old data, competitors add reviews, Google changes what it shows. But you own everything either way. If you stop, nothing gets taken from you; it just stops being tended.

What if I move, or open a second location?

Moving is a proper project, the profile, every citation, the schema and the site all have to change together, in order, or you lose ground. Tell us early. A second location is +$100 a month and a real conversation about whether it should be its own profile and its own pages.

Do you need access to my Google account?

Never your password. We send a manager invite you accept from inside your own profile, and you stay the owner. Same for Analytics, Search Console and ad accounts, delegated access, always, in your name.

My competitor has 400 reviews and I have 12. Is it hopeless?

No, but be realistic about the timeline. Review velocity matters as well as total, a business gaining eight a month is a stronger signal than one sitting on 400 from four years ago. Start asking every customer today and you will be somewhere different in six months. Start today, not after the site launches.

Do it yourself, or book the call

Everything above the paid section is genuinely yours to take. Spend the afternoon, do the four steps, and if that gets you where you need to be, we will have done our job for free and we are fine with that.

If you want the rest done properly, and done every month for a year, that is what we sell.

+1-248-205-6977 · Mon–Sun, 9am–9pm ET · Waterford, Michigan

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