Why this is still the highest-return free thing you can do
For most local searches, the map pack sits above the organic results and often above the ads. Three businesses appear. It costs nothing to compete for those slots, and a meaningful share of local businesses have a listing that is half-filled, out of date, or never claimed at all.
It also feeds the systems layered on top of search. Assistants and AI answers pull heavily from listing data, review text, photos and hours. Getting this right is not a separate project from AI visibility — it is most of it.
The parts most businesses leave blank
Categories. The primary category does more work than any other field, and secondary categories broaden what you can appear for. Pick the most specific primary that genuinely describes you, not the broadest.
Services and products. These are separate fields from your description and most listings ignore them. Fill them in with the language customers use, not internal terminology.
Hours, including holiday hours. A listing showing you closed when you are open loses the customer entirely, and Michigan holiday weeks are exactly when people search for emergency trades.
Photos, and specifically recent ones with real geographic context. Listings with current photos of actual work outperform stock imagery, and photos taken at recognisable local sites carry more weight than a logo.
The question-and-answer section. You can ask and answer your own questions here. Most businesses leave it empty and let a competitor or a confused customer write the only answer that appears.
Reviews: ask for sentences, not stars
Star average matters less than most owners think, and review text matters far more than almost anyone realises. When an assistant matches a request like “someone dependable in Sterling Heights,” it is matching against the words in your reviews.
So change what you ask for. Instead of “leave us a five-star review,” ask the customer to mention what the job was and how it went. One specific sentence — the service, the neighbourhood, what stood out — is worth more than a dozen bare ratings.
Reply to every review, including the bad ones, in public and without defensiveness. The reply is read by the next customer far more than by the one who complained.
Rotate where you ask. Google first, but Facebook reviews surface more than people expect in Bing-based and assistant results, and almost nobody works them. Yelp’s corpus is now licensed into ChatGPT. Sending every customer to the same platform leaves the others empty.
Michigan traps worth knowing
City and township are not the same thing and people search both ways. Plymouth City and Plymouth Township are separate entities with different boundaries; so are Canton Township and the surrounding cities. A service area set to one form of the name misses a share of the queries.
Proximity does a lot of work in the map pack, and Metro Detroit has some geographically enormous municipalities. Sterling Heights does not rank evenly from one end to the other for a single location. If you serve a wide area from one address, expect visibility to fall off with distance and plan content accordingly rather than assuming the listing covers it.
Downriver is a regional identity people search by name. So is “Metro Detroit” itself. If your service area includes those, the words should appear somewhere real on your site, not only in the listing.
Seasonality is sharper here than in most markets. Trades that cannot install between December and February should say so plainly, and the ones that can — because of the materials they use — should say that even more plainly. It is the single most useful thing a Michigan contractor can publish, and almost nobody does.
Make the listing and the website agree
The most common technical problem we find is not on the listing. It is that the website behind it does not corroborate what the listing says.
The name, address and phone number should match exactly, in text, on the site — not inside an image, and not only in a contact form. If your phone number changed, the site has to carry the new one before Google can verify it. We have seen a business run a Google Ads call extension that was disapproved for months because the number on the site did not match the one in the ad, meaning the ads never displayed a phone number at all.
The cities you claim to serve should have something real behind them. Not ten identical pages with the name swapped — that has been discounted for years — but at least an honest list, and ideally a page per area that says something specific about it.
And the site has to be readable by machines in the first place. If your homepage builds itself in the browser, Google and the assistants pulling from your listing are cross-referencing against an empty document. You can check that free at revioconsulting.com/tools/ai-visibility.
A monthly rhythm that works
Once a month: add photos from recent jobs, post an update, answer any new questions, check that hours are right for anything coming up.
Every week: reply to new reviews, and ask two or three finished customers for one — with the specific-sentence ask, not the star ask.
Twice a year: re-check categories against what you actually sell now, and confirm the name, address and phone match everywhere they appear online.
None of this is difficult and all of it compounds. It is the cheapest marketing available to a local business, and the gap between the businesses that do it and the ones that do not is visible in the map pack every day.