Local SEO in Lombard, IL, for a business Google doesn't know exists yet.

There's probably a listing for you already, and you've never seen it.

Google assembles listings out of whatever it can find — a supplier directory, a permit, a licence record, somebody adding a shop while staring at a map. So a version of your business may be sitting out there right now with a wrong closing time, your name spelled the way somebody guessed it and no photographs at all, answering questions on your behalf while you get on with the work.

Claiming it puts you in charge of what people are already being shown. Verification is usually a postcard, a call or a short video walk of the premises, depending on what Google asks of your category. It's the highest-value afternoon on this whole page, and until it's done the rest of the search work is pushing on a locked door.

When everything is missing at once, the order matters.

Owners starting from zero tend to do the interesting parts first and the load-bearing parts never. So there's a sequence, and we work through it in this order.

• Week one: the profile claimed and verified, the primary category chosen deliberately, the name, address and number saying one identical thing everywhere
• Week two: the site live, with a separate page for each service you want more of rather than a single list of nine
• Week three: photographs of the real place, every hour including the awkward ones, and the questions people phone up to ask answered in writing
• From then on: a request behind every finished job, every review answered, and one page written or rewritten each month

The first ten reviews are the hardest and the most valuable.

A profile with nothing under it reads as either brand new or quietly closed, and a stranger can't tell which. Ten honest reviews settle that question outright. After ten it stops being a milestone and becomes a habit that runs in the background.

So the asking gets built into the job instead of relying on you remembering during a rush. One message goes out behind each completed piece of work, the same wording for everybody, and nobody gets chased a second time. On Growth that runs by itself. Before then, do it by hand for two weeks and you'll see the effect for yourself.

Never buy them, never write them yourself, and never offer anything in exchange for one. It breaks Google's rules, customers can smell it from a distance, and a wall of perfect scores on a two-month-old business achieves the opposite of what you were hoping for.

Your name, address and number have to agree with each other.

Somewhere out there is an old suite number, a mobile you stopped answering, and a version of your name using an ampersand where the sign says the word. Google reads all of it while working out whether you're one business or three, and a business it can't pin down is one it shows less often.

Tidying that up is dull, invisible work with an actual finish line, which makes it rare in this field. It gets done once, thoroughly, and then guarded whenever something about you changes.

Write for what gets typed, not for what goes on a sign.

A sign carries your business name. A search carries the problem — somebody wants their gutters cleared, or a barber open on a Monday, or whatever the equivalent is in your trade at half past nine on a weeknight. Those two sets of words barely overlap, and only one of them is how new customers arrive.

So each service worth having more of gets a page to itself, written the way the thing is said out loud, with the town where it belongs and nowhere it doesn't. Underneath that sits structured data, spelling out your trade, your hours and the area you cover in a form a machine can read without interpreting a layout to get at it.

What we won't say, and what happens every week instead.

Nobody sells position on that map. Google doesn't take money for placement in local results, so a guarantee of the top three is a promise about something the person making it doesn't control. Anyone offering you one is counting on you not checking.

In its place, here is the trade — named work, on a rhythm, written down and reported back.

• The profile pushed forward every month rather than touched only when something breaks
• Requests going out behind finished work, and every review that arrives answered in your voice
• A page added or rewritten as you learn which services people are really ringing about
• Directories and listings kept saying one consistent thing about who you are and where you are
• Page speed and dead links watched, since Google quietly stops showing a page that broke
• A short written account each month of what we did and what it shifted, blank months included

The profile wakes up first. The website takes longer.

Filling in a profile that was empty can show results within a few weeks, since you're handing Google facts it wanted anyway. A site earning trust is slower work — three months is a fair point at which to start judging it, and a crowded trade takes longer than that.

Expect the map to move before the pages do, and treat anybody promising it inside a month as somebody who has never done it.