When someone in Anchorage searches "plumber near me," three businesses get the calls. Here's the checklist that decides which three — run it yourself before you pay anyone (including us).
Google Business Profile — half the battle
1. Right primary category. "Plumber," not "Contractor." The primary category is the single strongest signal on the profile; the wrong one can keep you out of the pack entirely.
2. Every field filled. Services, service areas, hours (including holiday hours — Alaska closures confuse Lower-48 chains' data), photos from your business, booking link.
3. Real photos, monthly. Profiles with fresh owner photos get measurably more actions. Phone photos of actual jobs beat stock photography every time.
4. Products/services with prices. Even ranges. It pre-qualifies callers, and Google rewards the completeness.
5. Q&A seeded. You can ask and answer questions on your own profile. Put your five most-asked questions there before a stranger answers them wrong.
Reviews — the prominence engine
6. A steady ask-flow. Ten reviews a month beats a hundred in one week (which looks bought, because it usually is). Post-job text with a direct link is the workhorse.
7. Owner responses on everything. Especially the bad ones — the response is read by every future customer, and it matters more than the star that prompted it.
8. Never buy reviews. Alaska profiles get suspended for this every month, and a suspended profile is worse than a weak one.
The plumbing nobody sees
9. NAP consistency. Your Name, Address, Phone must match exactly everywhere — site, GBP, Yelp, Apple Maps, chamber listings. One old phone number drags the whole profile.
10. Apple and Bing claimed. Every iPhone defaults to Apple Maps. It takes an hour and most of your competitors haven't done it.
11. LocalBusiness schema on your site. Structured data that tells search engines (and now AI engines) who you are, where you are, and what you do — machine-readably.
12. A real page per service, per area. "Furnace repair Wasilla" and "furnace repair Anchorage" are different searches. Thin doorway pages get filtered; real pages with local proof rank.
Scoring yourself
Ten-plus checked: you're ahead of most of the borough — keep feeding it. Six to nine: the gaps are your growth. Under six: your competitors are winning searches you deserve, and fixing this list is worth more than any ad budget.
Want us to run the audit instead? The free map-pack audit takes twenty minutes and you keep the fix list either way.