What I build, and what I grow.

You cannot pay Google for a better spot in the unpaid results — Google says so in its own help pages. You can pay for a Sponsored slot above them, and those carry a Sponsored label. Everything below that label is earned, and three things mostly decide it: how close you are to the person searching, how well your listing and pages match the words they typed, and how well known your business looks elsewhere on the web. You cannot move your shop, so the work is in the other two. That is mostly rewriting rather than spending.

Being found and being chosen are two different jobs, and you have already done the first one. What usually breaks the second is that a stranger cannot tell in a few seconds whether you cover their town, whether you handle their exact problem, and how to reach you without hunting for it. So I would read your own pages as that stranger, on a phone, before touching anything else. Often the fix is wording, and a phone number where the thumb already is.

It depends on hours, and I will show you which hours before you agree to any of them. What most quotes hide is the subscriptions you inherit at launch. Every outside service a build leans on is a bill you pay forever and one more thing that can break on a Sunday, so I keep that count as close to zero as the job allows — the site I built for State Auto Glass runs on four paid services in total. I would rather quote more hours once than hand you a cheap build with a long subscription tail.

You change it yourself, and that is a condition of how I build rather than an add-on. The owner of State Auto Glass edits every page, price and photo from a panel on his own site: no content system to license, and no invoice to me for a text change. If a build cannot give you that, I would rather say so at the start than sell you a site you have to phone someone to update.

A premium theme is often the right answer, and I set those up too — that is real work I do, not a consolation prize. The honest test is whether anything on your list does not fit a box the theme already has. For State Auto Glass the owner needed to edit every page, price and photo himself without calling me, so I built it from scratch. If nothing on your list is like that, take the theme and keep the difference.

Ask every customer, the same way, after the job is finished, and offer them nothing. Google's own rules name what gets a listing restricted: incentives of any kind, asking only the customers you know are happy, pressing people while they are still standing in front of you, and asking them to mention a member of staff. A restricted listing can be blocked from taking new reviews at all, which is worse than where you started. The routine I set up asks everyone and offers nothing.

There is no form to submit and nobody to pay. When an assistant answers a question about your trade in your town, it reads pages that are public at that moment — your site, your listing, review sites — and repeats what they say. If your site never states plainly what you do, which towns you cover and what a job involves, there is nothing for it to repeat. So the work is writing those plain answers on the page. Anyone quoting you a review count or a score threshold invented it.

Three ordinary things explain it, and the first is worth checking before anything else. They may be in a Sponsored slot, which is paid and carries a label. They may simply have been nearer to whoever ran that particular search. Or their listing and pages describe the exact job in the words customers use, while yours describe it in the words your trade uses. Google names three factors — relevance, distance and prominence — and review count is only one input to the third. The wording I can fix; distance changes with every person who searches, which is why the order you see is not the order they see.

That usually means one of two things, and both are checkable in an afternoon without spending anything more. Either the ads are being shown to people who were not looking for you, or the page they land on does not make calling obvious in one thumb-tap. So I would read the list of what people actually typed before your ad appeared, and open your page on my own phone, before touching your budget. If the answer is that it should be paused, I will tell you that.

I am not going to give you a date, because I have no measured results from past work to base one on and I will not invent one to win the job. What I will do is tell you what I changed and when I changed it, in writing, so you can hold it against your own phone log and your own diary and judge it yourself. If someone gives you a number instead, ask them where the number came from.