Guide
Your Google listing matters more
than your website.
Odd thing for someone who builds websites to say. But watch how a person actually hires a trade on a phone and it's hard to argue with — and it changes what you should be spending your attention on.
What actually happens
Nobody scrolls to your website.
Someone's hot water has gone. They pick up their phone and type "plumber near me". What loads first isn't a list of websites — it's a map with three businesses under it, each with a star rating, a review count, and a Call button.
Most people ring one of those three. They never scroll past them, and they certainly never open four websites to compare. The website only gets looked at if something makes them hesitate.
Your website's job is not to be found. Your Google listing gets you found. The website's job is to make someone comfortable ringing the number they already have.
Which is why a beautiful website attached to a neglected listing gets very quiet, and a plain website attached to a well-kept listing stays busy. Trades notice the second one and assume they got lucky.
How Google picks the three
Distance, match, and reputation.
Google is public about this. Three things decide who appears in that map block.
1. How close you are
To the person searching, not to the town centre. You can't do much about this one, beyond being honest about where you actually work.
2. How well you match what they typed
This is the one most trades lose on without knowing. If your listing says "contractor" and your website never spells out that you do boiler repairs in Coquitlam, Google is guessing. It guesses conservatively, so you appear for your business name and vanish for the job.
Fixing it is unglamorous: every service listed properly, every area you cover named, correct hours, and a block of structured data on the website that states your trade, service area and hours in the format Google reads directly rather than infers. That last one is missing from most trade websites — it's the single most common gap I find when I run a website audit.
3. How well regarded you are
Reviews, mostly. Not just the star rating — how many, how recent, and whether you reply. A business with 90 reviews and one from last week beats a business with 40 reviews and nothing since 2023, even at the same rating.
The part everyone gets wrong
Reviews are the whole ballgame.
Reviews do two jobs at once, and that's what makes them worth more attention than anything else on this page.
- They decide whether you're in the three. Reputation is a ranking factor, so reviews move you up the map.
- They decide whether you get the call. Once you're in the three, the person is choosing between you and two competitors on a screen the size of a beer mat. The rating and the count are most of what they can see.
So the same effort pays twice. Nothing else on your marketing does that.
Why you don't have as many as you should
Not because your customers are unhappy. Because asking is awkward and you're on to the next job. You mean to text them, you don't, and the moment passes. A week later it's too late to ask without it being strange.
The fix isn't discipline, it's timing. A text that goes out automatically when the job is marked done, while they're still standing in a fixed bathroom, gets answered. One follow-up a few days later catches the rest. That's it — and it's the difference between four reviews a year and four a month.
One thing I won't do, and neither should anyone else
Plenty of people selling this will offer to screen your reviews — ask how the job went first, and only send happy customers to Google. It's a common feature and it sounds sensible.
It's against Google's content policy. It's called review gating, and listings get their reviews wiped for it. The risk lands on your business, not on the company that set it up, and you'd find out when the reviews you'd spent two years earning disappeared.
Every customer gets the same request. If that worries you, the problem isn't the review system.
If you do nothing else
Four things, this week.
- Claim your profile if you haven't, and check the hours, the phone number and the service areas are right. Wrong hours are the most common reason a listing quietly stops getting calls.
- List every service separately. Not "plumbing" — drain cleaning, water heater replacement, leak detection, whatever you actually do.
- Add photos of real jobs. Not stock. Listings with recent photos get more clicks, and people can tell the difference immediately.
- Ask every customer for a review, the day the job finishes, by text. Every one, not the ones you're confident about.
None of that needs me. If you do those four and nothing else, you'll be ahead of most of your competition, because most of them won't.
What I do about it
See your website
before you pay a cent.
The listing, the reviews and the website are one job, not three. I set up all of it, and I build the website first so you can see it before you pay anything.
Or call (888) 240-2477. If you'd rather start with your current website, the free website audit takes about thirty seconds.