Consider a solo electrician working out of east Clark County who serves Washougal, Camas, and the Highway 14 corridor. They're doing solid work, getting occasional reviews without asking, and running a modest Google Ads budget to keep the phone ringing.
Their GBP was set up when they got their license, they have one category, no secondary categories, no schema on their site, and their last GBP post was 18 months ago. Sound familiar?
In month one of local SEO, we rebuild their GBP with four categories: Electrician, Emergency Electrician, EV Charging Station Contractor, Lighting Contractor.
Service areas get updated to list Washougal, downtown Washougal, Washougal River Road, Camas, and the east Vancouver corridor by name. We add LocalBusiness and Service schema to their website and fix the page structure so Google can clearly read what they offer.
By month two, we've built three new service pages: one for panel upgrades targeting older Washougal homes, one for EV charger installation targeting the Clark County EV corridor, and one for emergency electrical work.
We've also submitted their business to the Camas-Washougal Chamber directory and a dozen Clark County contractor platforms with consistent NAP.
We set up automated review requests after every job. Within 60 days, they go from 22 Google reviews (last one 4 months old) to 38 reviews with 12 posted in the past 30 days.
By month three, they're ranking in the Google Maps top three for "electrician Washougal WA," "panel upgrade Washougal," and "EV charger installation Washougal." Their Google Ads spend drops by 40% because organic is covering what ads used to.
By month nine, they've cut their ad budget by more than half and call volume from organic search is higher than it was from ads alone.