Local search
People are searching for what you do and finding someone else
It is a very simple problem. You provide a service in a particular area. Someone nearby looks up that service, you are not in the top three results — and as far as they are concerned, do you even exist?
The problem
They are searching. They are just not finding you.
Someone nearby searches for exactly the service you provide. Before a single website loads, Google shows three businesses with their ratings attached. That block is where the enquiry comes from, and getting into it has almost nothing to do with how good your website is.
It is decided by a profile that is filled in properly and by reviews from real clients. Most firms have neither — not through carelessness, but because claiming a profile is fiddly and nobody enjoys telephoning a client to ask a favour.
- 98%
- of consumers used the internet to find a local business.
- BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey
- 3
- businesses appear in the map box above the ordinary results. Almost nobody scrolls past them.
- How Google presents local results
Published research about how people behave, from a named survey you can check — not claims about results we have produced.
Proof
268 visitors a quarter, to 5,420
This is toothcheck.io, a client of ours — a second-opinion service where patients upload dental X-rays for a dentist to review. The figures below are published with their permission, and the site is live, so you can open it and check the work behind them yourself.
- +1,922%
- unique visitors against the previous quarter — 268 then, 5,420 now.
- Web analytics, last 90 days
- 2,232
- clicks from Google search, from a standing start in mid-June.
- Google Search Console, 16 Jun – 13 Sep
- 19.8K
- citations by Microsoft Copilot, across 22 pages on average.
- Bing Webmaster Tools, last 3 months
What this does and does not tell you
ToothCheck is a web product, and that growth came from organic search — getting pages indexed, answering the questions people actually type, and fixing the technical work that decides whether any of it is seen. It did not come from a Google Business Profile or from review calls, which is what this page sells.
So treat it as evidence of the discipline rather than of the mechanism: that we know how search works, that we measure from the platforms’ own reporting rather than our own, and that we will show you the chart either way. For a local business the lever is different — the profile and the reviews — which is why the three-month review below is measured on your numbers, not ours.
The three-month guarantee
If the views have not gone up in three months, you stop paying
Before we touch anything we record what your profile is doing today — views, searches, calls and direction requests, taken straight from Google’s own reporting rather than from us. That figure goes to you in writing.
Three months later we look again, together, at the same numbers from the same place. If profile views have not risen, we keep working and you stop being billed — until they have.
Why not simply refund you?
Because a refund puts the money back and leaves you exactly where you started, which is the position you were paying to get out of. Carrying on unpaid until it works is the more useful promise, and it is the one we would rather be held to.
One condition, and it is practical rather than legal: we need continued access to the profile’s reporting for the three months, because otherwise neither of us can see whether the number moved.
Get found
Tell us where you work and what you do
We will look at your profile before we reply and tell you what is missing from it — including if the answer is nothing much, in which case you do not need us.
Worth reading
How this actually works, written out properly
No sign-up and nothing withheld. If you would rather do this yourself, these will tell you how — and that is a perfectly good outcome.
Your Google Business Profile, and why reviews decide it
What the profile actually controls, which parts of it matter, and why reviews move you further than anything you can write about yourself.
Read it →Getting other websites to link to yours
Links are votes from other people, and most businesses already qualify for several they have never claimed. Where the honest ones come from, and which shortcuts do damage.
Read it →Writing pages that answer what people actually search for
Most business articles exist because somebody said to publish articles. How to find the questions people are actually worried about, and what happened when we did it.
Read it →
Questions
The things people ask before saying yes
- Why monthly? Is the profile not a one-off piece of setup?
- The setup is. The reviews are not. A profile completed once and then left alone slides back down, because the businesses above you are collecting reviews every month and you are not. So the monthly fee buys the part that keeps working: your clients telephoned as work finishes, new reviews arriving steadily, the profile kept current, and replies written to what people leave. If all you want is the profile filled in once, say so on the call — that is a smaller job and we will price it as one rather than sell you this.
- Can you do this if you did not build our website?
- Yes, and it is the same price. The profile is a Google product rather than part of your site, so it works independently of who built what. For a site we did not build, the setup is included in the engagement rather than assumed to be done already.
- What if a client leaves a bad review because you telephoned them?
- Anyone who is unhappy is flagged straight back to you and is not asked for a review. That is deliberate: a dissatisfied customer is a conversation for you to have, and steering them towards a review form is how a private grumble becomes a public one. It also means the reviews that do appear are from people who were genuinely pleased, which is the only kind worth having.
- How long does it take?
- The profile work is an afternoon. The calling is the part that takes time, because it is thirty conversations fitted around when people actually answer their phone — usually a couple of weeks. Reviews then appear as people get round to writing them, which is not something anyone can schedule.
Tell us what you're up against
Describe the situation in a couple of lines. We'll tell you straight whether we can help, what it would cost, and how long it would take.