Running a local SEO line on almost no internal time. The whole delivery system, and the hour a month it actually costs you.
Thomas Hassett
Start Here
What This Doc Does
You have seen why the local backend is worth adding. That is the hub doc. You have seen why local clients go quiet and leave. That is the churn doc. The worry left for most agency owners is simple. Will adding a service eat my week?
This doc answers it. It walks the whole delivery engine, every step we run under your brand, and shows you the real time it costs you. It comes out to about an hour a month.
The Short Version
How It Works
You Hand Us the Client
We run the whole local SEO and Google Business Profile system under your brand. The client only ever sees you.
Your Part Each Month
Forward what you know about the client once at the start. Read a report. Present the wins as your own and keep the relationship.
Our Part Every Month
We do everything else, and we stay invisible while we do it.
What Changed
The Ground Moved In 2026
A lot of what gets sold as local SEO stopped being safe this year. In April 2026 Google banned staff review quotas and asking customers to name a technician, and switched on Gemini-powered enforcement that pulled 292 million reviews last year. Review gating, screening for happy customers before sending the review link, is banned now and actively caught. The Q&A section on profiles died, the feature shut off in November 2025 and went dark for the public from December.
You do not have to follow any of this. Staying current with Google's rules is our job. Your client just sees a profile that keeps working.
Step One
Intake, Your 20 Minutes
This is the one real time ask, and it happens once.
We send you a short set of questions about the client. The jobs they actually want, the areas they cover, anything you already know. You send it back.
Then We Take Over
Competitor research, keyword research, and a baseline grid scan that maps where the client ranks across their service area right now. That snapshot is the starting point. When the grid moves later, it is what proves it moved.
Step Two
The Foundation, None Of Your Time
This is the Google Business Profile build. The primary category set correctly, which is the single biggest ranking lever and the one most profiles get wrong. Services listed with real descriptions. The business description rewritten so it works as a ranking signal. Photos. Attributes.
This is also the foundation Google's AI reads from when it answers questions about the business, so getting it complete does double duty. You do nothing here. You will see it in the first report.
Step Three
Same Facts Everywhere
Why It Matters
Google checks the client's name, address and phone against the rest of the web. When those disagree, ranking suffers.
So we get the core business data accurate and consistent across the places that count, so every source Google already trusts says the same thing.
Your Time on This
Quiet, unglamorous, and entirely on us.
Step Four
Every Week, Without You In It
Weekly Posts
Posts go up on schedule. Since the Q&A feature is gone as of December 2025, posts are now where the common customer questions get answered.
Fresh Photos
New photos added regularly. The profile reads as a live business to Google because it is one.
Active Monitoring
This is the part most agencies quietly skip, and the part that holds rankings. It is also the part you never have to think about.
Step Five
The Review Engine, Done The 2026 Way
Reviews still move rankings, and getting them wrong now gets them deleted. So we ask every customer, in neutral language, with no scripting, no naming a technician, no kiosks, no screening the happy ones first. All of that is banned and Google's AI is removing reviews that show the pattern.
Asking everyone honestly is slower than the old tricks. It is also the only version that survives, which means your client's reviews stay on the profile. We run the whole flow.
Step Six
Showing Up In The AI Answers
More Than the Map Pack
We shape the profile data and the FAQ content on the site so Google's AI has clean, correct answers to pull. Ask Maps and the AI overviews answer customer questions directly now, sourced from the profile, the reviews and that FAQ content. The same foundation work that ranks the client in the map pack is what feeds those answers.
What This Costs You
The engine already points at where local search is heading, and it costs you nothing extra.
Step Seven
Reporting, Your 10 Minutes A Month
Here is the part you actually touch. Every month the client gets a report with your name on it. It shows the grid moving, the share of searches where they sit in the top three, and the calls, direction requests and website clicks the profile brought in. Tied to dollars, using the client's average job value.
Agencies lose local clients when the client cannot see the work or connect it to money. This report answers both before the client thinks to ask. Reporting is the rhythm of keeping a client, and the rhythm runs whether you wrote the report or we did.
White Label
How It Shows Up Under Your Name
Your Brand on Everything
The report carries your logo and goes out on your domain. The client never sees us.
You Run the Relationship
You handle the conversation, we handle the work, and you decide how much we exist. Most agencies keep us fully invisible.
The ten minutes you spend reading a report looks, to your client, like a full team that never sleeps.
Your Half Of It
What Stays Yours
None of this takes you out of the work that matters. You are still the one who knows the client, who picks which of them this fits, and who reads what the numbers mean for their business.
You hold the relationship and the trust you built to win them. We hold the wrenches. Your client keeps calling you the smartest marketing decision they made, and they are right, because you are the one who brought the whole thing to their door.
You keep the client relationship and the strategy calls. The day to day delivery is ours.
Before You Stake Your Brand
You Do Not Have To Trust Us Blind
See It As It Happens
You are not waiting on a monthly report to find out what we did. You can look at the work any time. Nothing about the delivery is a black box to you or to your client.
Start On Referral
If putting your brand on it day one feels like a leap, send one client the referral way first. We deliver under our own name, you take a share, and you watch a real account run for a few weeks before you commit anything. Most agencies move to full white-label once the work holds up.
The Math
So Where Does The Hour Go?
60 min
First Month
Intake questions, plus reading your first couple of reports. Front-loaded and done.
~15 min
Every Month After
Read the report, send it on, answer the odd client question in a sentence.
0 min
The Actual Work
Every bit of delivery sits with us.
So the heaviest month is about an hour. After that it settles to fifteen minutes while the work keeps running. The engine runs whether you are at your desk or on a beach in Portugal. We have yet to meet an agency owner who minds their shop looking like it never sleeps.
What To Expect
The Shape Of It Over Time
1
Days 1 to 7
Profile work goes live within days of intake.
2
Month 1
The foundation lands. Categories, descriptions, citations, review engine running.
3
Month 2 to 3
Real movement in the grid starts to show.
4
Month 3 Onward
Compounds from there. Consistency is what local search rewards.
One of our contractor accounts went from an average rank of 10.03 to 2.56 over five months, with their share of top-three placements climbing from under a quarter to three quarters. The full numbers are on the client results page.
The Economics
An Hour A Month, For This Margin
40%
Gross Margin Floor
Local SEO runs 40 to 60 percent gross margin because there is no ad spend to pass through.
60%
Gross Margin Ceiling
Google Business Profile management is the service local clients value most and the one most agencies under-deliver.
Adding it gives the client another reason to stay, and agencies that bundle services churn far less than ones selling a single line, per Focus Digital's 2026 report. The work is what keeps the client. We do the work, you keep the margin, and your time cost is about an hour.
Proof
The Numbers, If You Want Them
General Contractor
Rank movement and lead value laid out in full on the client results page.
Carpet Company
Real numbers from a real account, not projections.
Painter
Three accounts, three different trades, same engine running behind each one.
If you have been reading this and quietly running it against your own client list, that is the right instinct. The next step is a short call about which of your clients this fits and what putting us behind your brand looks like. About thirty minutes, no pitch deck.