The profile worked weekly, not claimed once.

Sign in to the Google account that owns the listing, search your business name, and the edit panel appears in the results. That is the whole answer, and it costs nothing. What the panel will not tell you is which primary category your competitors rank under, which of your services are missing, or why you disappear four miles from your own front door. Managing the listing is a login. Ranking with it is a program, and that is what this page sells.

It sits inside our Local Engine at $1,500 a month, which covers the profile worked every week, the site's pages worked every month, citations kept correct, the review engine running, technical upkeep, plus a monthly report and a real call. The Market Engine at $3,000 a month runs that same work across every market you serve and adds the social profiles, the link outreach program, the AI-search program at full strength and conversion testing. Page counts and posting frequency are agreed in writing per engagement. The price is flat at either tier, and what changes is how many towns and services the work is pointed at.

Not always, and we would rather say so now than three months in. If your categories are right, your services are all listed, you post yourself, plus you reply to every review inside a day, you are already doing most of this and a retainer would mostly buy you a report. The free Snapshot will flag that outright at no cost. Where it does pay is the common case: a profile claimed once years ago, half the fields empty, a competitor eight miles out taking the calls.

Field fixes move first. Correcting the primary category, filling out services, setting the service area properly: those can shift position inside 30 to 60 days because Google reprocesses the profile quickly. Review volume and the pages that support the listing compound over 4 to 6 months. Proximity never changes, so the realistic target is not first everywhere. It is first across the part of your service area where you are close enough to compete, then pushing that edge outward.

Yes, and it happens more often than people expect. The usual causes are keywords stuffed into the business name, a virtual office or mailbox used as the address, hours you do not actually keep, or a second listing created for one location. A suspension pulls you out of Maps entirely while you appeal, which can run weeks. We will not stuff a name for you even on request, because the bump lasts until it does not and the recovery costs more than it earned.

Barely, on their own, and an agency selling you posts alone is selling the cheapest visible thing it can produce. A post is a freshness and conversion signal rather than a ranking lever. What posts do well is fill the panel a buyer is already staring at, answer an objection before the phone call, keep an offer in front of somebody comparing three listings. We post to it every week because that earns a place next to the field work, not instead of it.