Available now
Five things sit on a Google listing. Each one costs you calls in a different way, and none of them is obvious until somebody explains the mechanism.
If your listing shows a “Claim this business” button, nobody owns it. Google built it automatically from what it found, and it is running unsupervised.
That means you cannot reply to a review, correct the hours, or add a photo — and anyone can suggest an edit to it, including a competitor. It also means the listing shows a customer that nobody is minding the shop, which is the impression you least want at the exact moment somebody is choosing.
In one sample of local plumbers, three of eleven were unclaimed. All three were real, working businesses.
Hillside Plumbing & Drain
Claim this businessThis one has to be first, and it takes about a week. Google mails a postcard with a verification code to your business address. Everything else waits on it, so it is worth starting before anything else — including before you decide whether to hire anyone.
Google puts photos at the top of a listing, above the description, above almost everything. It is the first thing a person sees and the thing they scroll.
A listing with no photos does not read as “a business that has not got round to photos.” It reads as closed, or abandoned, or a placeholder. Meanwhile the busiest listing in the same town often has a hundred or more.
They do not need to be good photographs. They need to exist: the truck, the crew, a finished job, the van in somebody’s driveway. Twenty phone pictures beats nothing by an enormous margin, and it is the single fastest thing on this page to fix.
Everybody knows review count matters. The part that gets missed is the replies.
Someone leaves an angry three-star review about a missed appointment. If it sits there alone, every future customer reads a complaint and nothing else. If underneath it there is a short, calm reply explaining what happened, the same customer reads a complaint and a business that answers. Those are completely different impressions from the same review.
★★★☆☆ Dave R.
Nobody showed up Tuesday morning. I took the day off work for nothing and never got a call.
★★★☆☆ Dave R.
Nobody showed up Tuesday morning. I took the day off work for nothing and never got a call.
Response from the owner
Dave, that one is on us. The van broke down and somebody should have phoned you before eight. If you will have us back we will do the job at no charge.
Two sentences is enough. It is not about winning the argument — it is about being visibly present.
This one is invisible from where you sit and it is often the most expensive.
Businesses accumulate extra Google listings over the years — created by a customer, generated automatically when an address changed, left behind by a previous owner. Your reviews split across them. Forty reviews on one listing and six on another does not look like a business with forty-six reviews. It looks like two mediocre businesses.
In a sample of eleven plumbers, two had duplicates and one had four separate listings.
Merging pools the reviews. But it deserves one honest warning: merging is not automatically good. If a strong listing merges with a forgotten one carrying two bad reviews, the visible average goes down. That arithmetic should be done before anything is filed, not after — and if the answer is “leave it alone,” that is the right answer.
This is the part that compounds, and the part nobody keeps up with.
The trick is not asking harder. It is capturing the customer’s email when the job is booked, not chasing it afterwards. A review request sent a day or two after you finish does far better than one sent three weeks later — and you can only be that fast if the address was already in the system before the work started.
Asking at intake is a two-second question that pays every month afterwards. Chasing it later means remembering, digging, and asking a man who has already moved on to the next job.
Worth saying plainly, because plenty of people in this business will imply otherwise.
$125 setup, then $195 a month. That is the founding rate — held for the first handful of clients, and it does not go up for as long as you stay. The standard rate afterwards is $250 and $295.
It covers claiming and repairing the listing, consolidating duplicates, keeping photos current, answering every review, review requests going to your customers after each job, and a monthly report that arrives in your inbox rather than behind a login.
No contract and no cancellation fee. If it is not doing anything for you, say so and it stops.
There is no sales call. If you want, we will look at your listing first and send you the whole picture — what is on it, how you compare to the other businesses in your town, and what we would do in what order. Free, and with nothing attached to it.
The one time we do need twenty minutes of your time is verification when there are duplicate listings to merge, because Google will only accept the codes from the owner. That is work, not a pitch, and it happens after you are already signed up.