First on the map, street by street.

Baney came to us with a name that worked. Nearly every click the site earned was somebody who already knew the company: a neighbor's referral, the truck in a driveway down the street, the sign in a yard after a storm. That is the best traffic a contractor gets, because the person typing it has already decided to be interested, and the site was converting it.

The problem was the ceiling on it. For the work itself, roofing, siding, storm damage, with a town on it, the site sat on page four or five, where no homeowner looks. A stranger with water coming through the ceiling was never going to find them.

So we wrote the site a page for each town they drive to, about that town and the work they do in it, and tidied what the site says about itself so Google reads it the way a homeowner would. This went on top of the name rather than in place of it. Searches for the work where the site now holds a top-three spot went from one to eleven. The line is Google's own reading of the site, month by month; the dashed line is where it started.

Search for a roofer from a kitchen table in Rockton and the first thing Google shows is a map with three names on it. Which three depends on where that table is. One rank number hides this completely, which is why so many contractors are told they rank first: a business can be first from its own front door and invisible a mile away, and never know.

So we keep the listing every week, categories, services, photos, posts, replies, and we track it on a grid: 81 points, three miles across the town, each one a real search run from that spot. This is what it looked like on the last scan. Green is the top three, the ring is the business's own address.