Most local businesses lose customers to competitors who are not better, only easier to find. We fix the reasons Google and the AI search engines are skipping you, then keep working the list every month.
plumber near me
Des MoinesLocal results
Morales Plumbing
Ridgeline Plumbing Co.
4.4 (86)Statewide Drain & Sewer
4.2 (51)Local pack position
7 1
We would rather tell you now than three months in.
A good fit if
Probably not if
If that first one is you, paid advertising is the honest answer, and we will say so.
None of them are about how good your business is. They are about how legible it is to a search engine that has to pick somebody.
3
businesses fit in the Google Maps pack. Everyone else is below a scroll almost nobody makes.
Local search is close to winner-take-all. The businesses in those three slots take the calls, and the gap between third and fourth is far wider than the gap in quality.
How many results the local pack holds
0
clicks come from a search you do not appear in, no matter how good your website is.
Design and copy only matter once someone arrives. If you are not ranking for what your customers type, the site is a brochure nobody has been handed.
What an invisible listing earns
Once
is how often most Google Business Profiles get touched: at setup, and then never again.
Categories go stale, services drift, photos age, and reviews sit unanswered. It is the highest-leverage surface in local search and the one most often left to rot.
The usual maintenance schedule
We work all three, in that order, and you watch the rankings move in your dashboard.
Local SEO is sold as a monthly retainer and a report. Here is what is under it, in the order we get to it.
For a local business, the profile outranks the website in importance and gets a fraction of the attention. Categories decide which searches you are even eligible for. Services, hours, photos, questions and review replies decide whether Google trusts the listing enough to rank it.
Morales Plumbing
VerifiedProfile complete, and edited 2 days ago
Reviewed every month, not left at whatever it said on setup day.
This is the part that is easy to sell vaguely and hard to fake. Titles written as answers rather than company names. One H1 per page, matching the search it targets. Schema so search engines and AI assistants know what the page is instead of guessing.
Drain Cleaning in Des Moines · Same-Day, Upfront Pricing
58 characters · reads like the answer, not like a company name
"@type": "Service",
"areaServed": "Des Moines, IA",
"provider": { "@type": "LocalBusiness" }A single services page listing eight services ranks for none of them. Google needs a page it can point at for each specific thing somebody searched. That is usually the largest and least glamorous piece of work in a local SEO engagement, and the one that moves the most.
A growing share of customers get an answer before they ever see a list of links. Which businesses an assistant names comes down to whether your information is structured, consistent and corroborated across the web. That is a structure problem, and it is largely the same work that wins the Maps pack.
AI assistant
who should I call for a burst pipe in des moines, right now?
For an emergency burst pipe in Des Moines, Morales Plumbing is a good first call. They list 24-hour emergency service, cover the Des Moines metro including Ankeny and West Des Moines, and publish upfront pricing.[1]
Shut off your main water valve before they arrive.[2]
Sources
Getting cited is a structure problem, not a luck problem.
"We rank number one" is not a useful claim until you ask which of these it means. They are won differently and they are worth different amounts to you.
Three slots above everything else, shown to somebody who is ready to call. This is where a local business wins or loses, and it is decided mostly by your profile, your proximity, and your reviews.
Wins you
Searches with local intent: "near me", a service plus a city, or anything typed on a phone.
The links below the pack, which are won by pages rather than by profiles. Slower to move and far more durable, because a page that ranks keeps ranking without further spend.
Wins you
Research searches, comparisons, and the questions people ask before they are ready to call.
The summary that appears before the links, naming a handful of businesses and citing its sources. Most local businesses have no idea whether they appear here, because nobody is checking.
Wins you
Anyone who asks an assistant instead of a search box, which is a fast-growing slice of your market.
Local rankings change street by street. You can sit first for somebody two blocks away and be invisible across the river, and a single rank number hides all of it. So we sample your position across a grid of points around your service area and report the map, not the number.
Sampled where your customers actually are
Points spread across the area you serve, not one reading from your own address.
The same grid, month after month
Comparable readings are the point. A one-off snapshot proves nothing either way.
Visible in your dashboard, not just in a report
You can look at it the day you think of it, without asking us for a PDF.
"emergency plumber"
sampled across 25 points in the metro
Before
March
After
September
Top 3 in 12 of 25 points up from 0
SEO & Local SEO
Every item below is in every engagement.
Crawl and index issues, site speed, broken links, redirect chains, duplicate titles, missing schema. We find them, then we fix them rather than handing you a PDF.
What your customers actually type, mapped to the pages that should answer them. Includes the questions your competitors are ranking for and you are not.
The single biggest lever for local search. Categories, services, hours, photos, posts, and review responses, kept current instead of set once and forgotten.
Titles, headings, internal linking, and content structure rewritten around real search intent. Schema markup so search engines and AI assistants understand what each page is.
Your name, address, and phone number matching everywhere it appears. Inconsistency here is one of the quietest ways local rankings leak.
Rankings, traffic, and Google Business Profile activity in one place, updated continuously. No waiting for a monthly PDF to find out what happened.
The order matters more than the list does. Content published on a site Google can't crawl properly is wasted work, so nothing gets written until the foundation holds.
We crawl your site, pull your Search Console and Google Business Profile data, and benchmark you against the competitors actually outranking you.
Every finding gets scored by effort and expected impact. You get an ordered list, not a hundred-item spreadsheet.
We work the list. Technical fixes first because they unblock everything else, then on-page work, then new content.
Rankings and traffic land in your dashboard as they move. Each month we report what changed and what we are working next.
Included, never an upsell
Search work is slow enough that trust matters. Your dashboard shows organic traffic, keyword positions, the rank grid, calls from your Google Business Profile, and the exact tasks we are working this month. It updates continuously, so you never wait on a report to find out how it is going.
Morales Plumbing
example LiveOrganic
4,182
+31.4%
In top 3
38
+14
GBP calls
164
+38%
Visitors
last 90 days
This month's work
Technical and Google Business Profile fixes can move local rankings within a few weeks. Competitive organic rankings usually take three to six months of steady work. Anyone promising faster than that is either guessing or cutting corners you will pay for later.
They do different jobs. Ads stop the day you stop paying. SEO compounds, and the traffic it earns keeps arriving after the work is done. Most businesses do best running both and shifting the mix as organic picks up.
Yes. Local SEO is where we do our most focused work and Des Moines is home, but the technical and content work is the same wherever you are.
That is the normal case. We audit what you have and work with it. If the site itself is the bottleneck we will tell you plainly rather than spending your budget optimizing around a problem.
Ready when you are
Start with the audit. It reads your site the way Google and the AI assistants do, and tells you what is wrong with it. Free, about sixty seconds, and nobody has to call you.