Guides
Fewer guides. Each one worth your time.
We would rather publish two properly researched guides than two hundred generic ones. Every guide here is written for owners, explains its method, and shows its sources and worked examples.
Pay-per-result marketing
How paying for completed, paid work compares with retainers, pay-per-click and pay-per-lead — and how to judge any provider.
In research now
These are being researched with first-party data, live search results and checked sources. They appear here once they are good enough to be worth reading.
- Pay-per-click vs pay-per-job: what local businesses really payA cost-per-paid-job comparison using an owner's own numbers.
- How to get into the Google Map PackHow Google picks the three map results — in its own words — and what you control.
- How AI assistants pick which local business to recommendResults from a fixed set of prompts, run and re-run over time.
- Google Business Profile checklist for service businessesEvery field that matters, with Google's own rules on eligibility and service areas.
- Getting more reviews without being pushyWhen and how to ask, within Google's review policies.
- Ranking in every town you coverService-area pages that add real local value instead of swapping city names.
- Furniture store website teardownA real furniture website, analyzed for search, speed and conversion.
- The repair-or-replace question: what HVAC customers search before they callSearch patterns and the pages that answer them.