What Google actually publishes
Google runs the ranking, so Google's own page is the authority worth reading. It lists the actions that affect where a business appears in local results, and it is short: verify the business, keep the information up to date, complete the business details including a full address, business hours, the business category and the attributes, respond to reviews, add photos and videos, and for retail, add in-store products.
"There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google."
Google Business Profile Help, Tips to improve your local ranking on Google
That sentence is on Google's own help page, and it is the reason this offer is written the way it is. Anyone selling you a guaranteed map position is selling something the operator of the map says is not for sale.
What we do each month
- Profile accuracy. Hours right, including the holiday hours nobody updates. Full address visible. Primary and secondary categories reviewed against what you actually sell. These are on Google's own list of details to complete.
- A reply to every review. Google names replying to reviews as one of its listed actions, and says positive reviews and helpful replies help a business stand out. We draft, you approve, we post.
- A steady flow of new reviews. Not a total, a flow. We put the ask into the moment the job finishes rather than a month later, because a review that never gets requested never arrives.
- Fresh photos. Adding photos and videos is on Google's list. We keep the profile from looking abandoned.
- Posts, sold as what they measurably do. Posts get customers a message and a reason to call. We do not sell them as a ranking lever, for the reason below.
- A monthly note in plain English. What was changed, what was posted, how many reviews came in and what they said. No dashboard you have to learn.
What we will not sell you
Photo geotagging
Injecting location data into photo files before uploading them is a standard line item in this industry. It cannot work. Sterling Sky tested it on 5 Business Profile listings that were not otherwise being worked, 3 geotagged images each, tracked over several weeks, and saw no measurable ranking change either organically or in the local pack. The mechanism is not weak, it is absent: Google strips the tags off the photos on upload, so the data is gone before anything could rank on it. Joel Headley, formerly of Google, put it plainly: it does not matter if the metadata exists. The test is published here.
A ranking timeline
You will see promises of movement in a set number of days. Google publishes no ranking-speed figure at all, so any timeline is invented. We will not give you one.
A locked position, or a threat about losing it
We do not promise a top-3 map position, and we do not tell you your ranking will collapse if you stop paying. Neither claim has anything behind it, and the second one is the sentence most likely to be read back to us in a refund dispute.
Keyword-stuffed review replies, or seeded questions and answers
Stuffing keywords into review replies is supported by nobody and is the shape of tactic Google's spam guidance exists to catch. Seeding your own questions and answers is not on Google's list either. Unproven is not the same as disproven, but neither gets sold here as a ranking lever.
Posts, sold as ranking
Sterling Sky ran 3 listings with no other work, one post per week, for 9 weeks, tracking 441 keywords per location, and found no measurable local pack ranking impact. We still write your posts, because the same conclusion says posts increase conversions and deliver a message to customers. That is a real benefit. It is just not the one it usually gets sold as. The test is published here.
What this costs
$1,500 a month
Google Business Profile management is delivered inside the OpsJuice Starter retainer, alongside the rest of your front-office automation. It is not a separate subscription and there is no cheaper tier of it, because there is no version of this work that is worth doing badly.
Month to month. Cancel with 30 days notice.
Not sure this is the right work for your business yet? Start with the assessment. It maps where your inbound actually leaks, and if the answer turns out to be your phones rather than your map listing, we will tell you that instead.
How to start
Every engagement starts with the $250 AI Assessment. We look at how customers currently find and reach you, where the leaks are, and what fixing each one is worth. If we build something for you afterwards, the $250 comes off the project cost.
If the assessment says your Google Business Profile is the weak link, this is the work that follows it.