Local SEO questions, answered without the sales pitch.

No, and neither should any agency that sells it. Google’s own guidance tells businesses to be wary of any SEO who guarantees rankings. What we commit to is measurable map visibility growth over the agreed window when the roadmap is followed, verified against your baseline heat map scan — not a promised position. The long version.

It varies with competition, starting visibility, market and how much work the profile needs. We run a defined 12-week roadmap so you have a fixed window to measure against, rather than an open-ended retainer with no comparison point. Profile-level changes can show movement in the first few weeks; prominence work built on reviews and citations compounds more slowly and is usually clearest between weeks 6 and 12. The full week-by-week roadmap.

Geo-grid tracking measures local search visibility from dozens of points spread across your service area, instead of one ranking check from one location. Google weighs the searcher’s distance heavily, so you can rank first at your own address and be invisible three kilometres away. A single rank number cannot show you that; a geo-grid can.

Because distance is one of the three factors Google names behind local ranking, alongside relevance and prominence. A ranking observed at your own location is not what a customer three kilometres away sees. That is the entire reason we scan a grid rather than one point.

Yes. Google uses Business Profile information to understand and represent a business in Search and Maps, and eight of the ten strongest Local Pack signals come directly from the profile — categories, services, attributes and hours chief among them. It is usually the single highest-leverage thing to fix first.

Yes, though less directly than the profile does. On-page signals are the one category that carries across all three surfaces — the Map Pack, local organic results and AI-generated answers — so a weak website eventually caps what profile work alone can achieve.

Google names three factors — relevance, distance and prominence — and a 2026 industry survey breaks those into rough weights: about 55% proximity, about 32% Google Business Profile signals, 16 to 20% review signals, and about 19% on-page website signals. Those are third-party estimates, not Google’s disclosed formula, and they do not sum to 100 — use them to prioritize effort, not as a decomposition of the algorithm. Citations and backlinks matter too; the same survey does not publish a clean weight for either, which is why we will not invent one. The full sourced breakdown.

There is no number that guarantees a ranking, and anyone quoting one is guessing. Review recency now counts for more than raw volume, so a steady, ongoing flow of authentic reviews matters more than a one-time push to a round number.

Not directly. Only the person who wrote a review can delete it. You can report a review that breaks Google’s policies — spam, fake, hate speech, a conflict of interest — and Google may remove it after review, but there is no way to take one down solely for being negative. The better lever is a professional public reply, plus a steady flow of new, genuine reviews around it. That flow is most of what review management with us actually is.

Google has not confirmed replies as a ranking signal, so treat any claim that they are as unproven. What is measured is customer behaviour: consumer research finds roughly 80% of people are more likely to use a business that responds to all its reviews, and about 81% expect a reply within a week. That is worth doing on its own, whether or not it moves a position.

Engagements run $1,000 to $3,000 a month, depending on how competitive your industry and service area are — the full pricing breakdown is published here. The number that actually matters is not the fee, it is whether one extra job a month covers it; run your own numbers to see. Below the $1,000 floor, the honest recommendation is to work our Map Pack Check yourself.

The Map Pack Check is instant and self-serve: about four minutes, runs entirely in your browser, and scores your profile against our published 12-point checklist. The free Map Pack audit is hand-run by us: a real geo-grid scan of your visibility across up to three keywords, a NAP consistency check across major directories, a review profile read, the competitors currently holding your grid, and a note on whether AI assistants can verify your business — delivered in two to three business days.

Yes. Two businesses in the same industry and city cannot both be moved to the top of the same grid, and an agency that takes both is charging two clients to compete with each other. When a territory is taken we say so and decline. Check current territory status.

Yes. We work with local service businesses across Canada and the United States — the method is identical because the Map Pack works the same everywhere. Our office is in Surrey, BC, and we hold dedicated market pages for the Metro Vancouver cities we know in the most detail.

It means visibility improved while something downstream limited conversion: market demand, seasonality, your offer or pricing, review sentiment, the website visitors land on, or how calls are handled when they arrive. Local SEO increases opportunities; it does not create demand that isn’t there. That diagnosis is part of the monthly review, not an upsell.