How to read this list
Every one of these is something a small service business can start without hiring anyone. They are ordered roughly by return on the hour, and two of them have legal rules attached that most owners have never read. Those two are the ones people get wrong, so they are near the top.
Pick three. Twelve at once is how a marketing plan becomes a document nobody opens.
The three that pay for their own hours
1. Finish your Google Business Profile. It costs nothing and takes about half an hour. Google's page on local ranking names relevance, distance and prominence as the factors behind local results, and says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up. It also says there is no way to pay for a better local ranking, which tells you how to price the advice you get about it. The primary category, the service list with prices, the 750-character description, real photos. Field by field: the 30-minute checklist.
2. Ask every customer for a review, in the same words. Not the happy ones. Everyone. Google's prohibited and restricted content policy lists among the things merchants must not do: "discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers." Deciding at the counter who seems pleased enough to ask is selective solicitation, and so is the feedback kiosk that routes the low scores to a private form. In the US the FTC's rule on consumer reviews and testimonials comes at the same behaviour from another angle, prohibiting incentives conditioned on a review's sentiment and barring a business from claiming its review section shows all reviews when negative ones have been suppressed.
The fix is a system rather than a judgement call. One trigger — appointment complete, invoice paid — one message, sent to everybody: "Thanks for coming in. If you have a minute, we'd appreciate a Google review, good or bad. [link]" Google will generate the short link and a QR code for you, documented on its tips to get more reviews page. The full version, including how to measure whether the request is working: how to get more Google reviews.
3. Answer your phone questions in writing. Every question you answered out loud this week is a page. Parking, insurance, price, how long it takes, whether you see kids, what happens if it goes wrong. Google publishes a set of self-assessment questions for content in its guidance on creating helpful, people-first content, and one of them is the test worth applying to your own service page: "After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they've learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?" These pages are also what an AI assistant has to work from when somebody asks it for a good one nearby, so put prices in plain text, not in a PDF and not in a picture of a menu.
Content that shows the work
4. Before and after. The most reliable content a service business owns, because the result is the argument. Hair, renovations, cleanings, detailing, landscaping, physio. Shoot the "before" as a habit, because you cannot go back for it. Same angle, same light, no filter that flatters the after.
5. Film the process. Fifteen to thirty seconds of the actual work, with the sound on. People want to know what they are buying, and most services are invisible until someone shows them. Two documented things to avoid: Instagram's ranking explainer says it aims to make certain reels less visible, including "low-resolution or watermarked reels, reels that are muted or contain borders, reels that are majority text, or reels that have already been posted on Instagram." So export clean rather than reposting a TikTok with the watermark on it, and do not build a reel out of text cards.
6. Show your face. The owner explaining something in thirty seconds outperforms the same information as a graphic, and it is the one thing a competitor cannot copy. Once a month is enough. TikTok's explanation of its recommendation system notes that "neither follower count nor whether the account has had previous high-performing videos are direct factors" — which is the actual reason a business with 200 followers is worth filming for at all.
7. Turn one visit into a month of raw material. Shoot in batches. An afternoon with a phone on a tripod, six or seven clips, is the difference between a content plan and a weekly panic. Most of what dies in month three dies because every post required a fresh idea on the day.
The list you own, and the law attached to it
8. Start a monthly email. Past customers already know your work, which makes them the cheapest audience you will ever have, and the only one no platform can take away from you. One useful thing, one update, one offer, and out.
Then read the rules, because email is regulated and social media largely is not. In Canada, CASL requires three things of a commercial electronic message, set out in the CRTC's FAQ on the legislation: obtain consent, provide identification information, and provide an unsubscribe mechanism. Consent can be express or implied, and implied consent from an existing relationship runs for a defined period rather than forever. Note that CASL covers SMS as well as email, which catches out businesses that treat texting as informal.
If you are emailing into the United States, the FTC's CAN-SPAM compliance guide sets a different shape of rule: no misleading headers or subject lines, identify the message as an advertisement, include a valid physical postal address, and give a clear opt-out that you honour promptly. It applies to business-to-business email too, and the guide states penalties of up to $53,088 per individual email in violation.
9. Ask for referrals properly. A note and a small credit to the person who sent someone your way. Keep this well clear of your review requests, because a reward attached to a review is exactly what both Google's policy and the FTC rule prohibit, while a reward for a referral is ordinary business.
CASL has a narrow referral exception worth knowing about: for the first message following a referral, consent is not required if the referrer has a qualifying relationship with both you and the recipient, the referrer's full name is stated in the message, and the message says it was sent as a result of a referral. One message only, and it still needs your identification and an unsubscribe link.
Local presence, which is slower and stickier
10. Partner with the business next door. Find someone serving the same customer without competing for the same dollar. A gym and a physio. A salon and a photographer. A dental practice and an orthodontist. Start with something concrete and small: a card on their counter, a joint offer, one shared post. The pitch that works is what you will do for them, not what you would like from them. Walk in with the offer already made: "I'd like to put your cards on my counter and mention you to clients who ask. If it goes well and you want to do the same, great." Half of them say yes on the spot because you have asked for nothing, and the half who do not still remember you. Set a date six weeks out to check whether anything came of it, because the partnerships that quietly do nothing are the ones that stay on your list for years.
11. Be at one local event a season. The stall itself may or may not pay for itself. The photographs and video will, because an afternoon at a market gives you a month of content in which your business is visibly part of the neighbourhood. Bring someone whose only job is to shoot.
12. Sponsor the thing your customers already show up to. A team, a school fundraiser, a run. Small money, and it puts your name where people who live within your radius already are — which matters more than it sounds once you understand that distance is one of the three published factors in local search.
What each one costs, and what you can actually check
| Time to set up | What you can measure | |
|---|---|---|
| Business Profile | 30 min, then 15 min a month | Calls, direction requests and website clicks in the profile performance report |
| Review requests | One afternoon to automate | Reviews per hundred customers served |
| Answering questions in writing | 2 hours a page | Queries and clicks in Search Console |
| Reels and process video | 2–3 hours each | Median views and saves per post, not followers |
| Monthly email | 2 hours a month | Opens, clicks, and bookings you can trace back |
| Referrals and partnerships | Ongoing, unschedulable | Ask every new customer how they found you, and write it down |
That last row is the cheapest analytics in existence and almost nobody does it. One question at intake, one column in a spreadsheet, and in three months you know which of these twelve to keep.
Three that keep getting recommended and rarely earn it
- Buying followers or engagement. Beyond the obvious, the FTC's review rule also prohibits selling or buying fake indicators of social media influence. A padded follower count also makes your own numbers unreadable, so you lose the only feedback you had
- Directory bundles sold by the hundred. Get your details right on the handful of places your customers actually use and your industry actually maintains. Being listed on 400 sites nobody visits is a subscription, not a strategy
- A rebrand, when what is broken is that nobody has heard of you. New colours are satisfying and measurable in nothing. Do the profile, the reviews and the questions first, then decide whether the logo was ever the problem
Two rules that decide whether any of it works
Pick a pace you can hold in your busiest week, not your quietest. Three posts a week sustained for a year beats a month of six and then nothing, for a reason that has nothing to do with algorithms: the second version stops. There is a longer argument about this, with what the platforms actually publish, in how often to post.
Give it long enough to be judged. The profile work shows movement in your own performance report sooner than the website work does. Search on the content side takes about 90 days before the numbers are worth arguing about. Anything you are told will move faster than that is either advertising, which does move faster, or a claim nobody can back.
And if production keeps slipping — if the reason nothing on this list happened is that there was no afternoon in which to do it — that is a staffing problem wearing a marketing costume, and no better list will fix it.
What we run, and what it costs
Most of this list lives inside Organic Growth, at $1,000 CAD a month: the week planned, made and published, your Google Business Profile, review requests and replies, articles and the search work under them, and your website built and edited when you ask. You approve everything from your phone before it goes out.
There are four lines and we sell them separately, with no discount for taking more than one. Organic Growth is $1,000 a month. Paid Growth is $1,000 a month, with the ad budget separate and paid from your own account, roughly $1,000 a month minimum spend before a campaign can learn anything, covering up to $10,000 a month. B2B Sales is $2,000 to set up and then $1,000 a month. Automation is from $1,500 to build and $500 a month after that. All figures CAD.
The constraint that comes with the organic line: search takes about 90 days to move. Ads are the only one of the four that changes a number inside a month, and we would rather say that now than in month four.
Which three should you start with?
Book a free consultation. We will bring sample content made for your business and pick the first three ideas with you, in the order that suits what you sell. If you would rather read before you talk, what Google publishes about local ranking and what a small business should actually budget are the two that change most people's plan.