Search your own shop. Yelp comes up. You don’t.

Then this isn’t about getting more work today. It’s about who owns your name tomorrow. Right now, if you searched your business, most of page one belongs to directories that sell your customers to your competitors and publish hours you can’t correct. The day the chair isn’t full, you’ll want that page back, and it takes about ninety days to earn. Building it while you’re busy is the cheap version. Building it while you’re slow is the expensive one.

No, and the difference costs you money. That page is rented. You can’t control what it says, you can’t add your own words, and in several cases we have documented, the platform page ranking for a shop's name printed hours that were flatly wrong or stated in writing that it wasn’t affiliated with the business at all. Your booking platform is a great front door. It’s a terrible house. We link to it prominently, we just don’t let it be the only thing Google can find.

You see the finished first draft before any money moves. If it’s not obviously better than what a stranger’s currently ranking for your name, you say so and you owe nothing. You keep the audit either way. We’d rather lose a week than talk you into something you’re not proud to send your customers.

It sounds like that one left a mark, and being careful with the second try is the right instinct. A lot of owners feel the same way. Most of the ones we sit down with have felt it, and what they found when we pulled the old site up was that the design was never the problem. Nobody had put the address on the Google profile, nobody had written the real hours into the page, and Google had no reason to show it to anybody. That’s why day six on our list is your Google Business Profile and not a homepage slider. Send us the old address along with the audit request and we’ll tell you what happened to it, whether or not you ever hire us.

Yes. The domain is registered in your name. The site is a single file we hand you. Your Google profile stays your Google profile with your login. Nothing is held on our side, and there’s nothing to pry loose if you leave.

It runs month to month for as long as you want it. Cancel any month and the site stays live and stays yours. Most owners keep it because reviews and posts are the actual ranking engine and nobody keeps that up on their own for more than six weeks. But if you want to run it yourself, we’ll hand you the same checklist we use and you can.

Seven days from the kickoff call to live, assuming you can get us photos and confirm your hours and prices in the first two days. The Google Business Profile work happens on day six and is usually the piece that moves your phone first.

Everywhere. The first thirty five happen to be Chicago and the towns around it — Morton Grove, Skokie, Niles, Park Ridge, Glenview, Lincolnwood, Wilmette, Northbrook, Wheeling and every Chicago neighborhood — because that is where we started and it is easier to stand in front of a shop and photograph its sign. But none of the work needs us in the room. We read your Google profile, your reviews and your photos, you approve the draft on your phone, and the whole thing is done over the phone and email in seven days. If you are outside Chicago, say so when you request the audit and we will tell you straight whether we can do it as well for you as we did for the thirty five below.

There are thirty five on this site: ten barbershops, five nail salons, seven hair salons and spas, six auto and oil shops, five dry cleaners and tailors, a menswear alterations shop and a beauty supply chain. Every one of them opens. Look at them on your phone, which is where your customer will. If your kind of business isn’t there, call and ask, and we’ll show you the closest thing we have got.

A small shop, not a call center. You get one person who answers the phone, and it’s the same person reading your reviews and writing your posts. Nothing goes near your name without being read first.