Local SEO for Detroit businesses

The first thing I do for a Detroit business is measure it. I check your Maps ranking on a grid of points across the city, then compare it to where your customers come from. The gap is usually easy to see: strong rankings around your address, weak ones in the neighborhoods that call you most.

That grid goes in your report every month, so you watch the map fill in, or not, instead of reading a single number for the whole city. Search rankings, calls from the profile and the site, and form leads sit next to it, with the previous month beside them. If something went down, it’s in the report with my read on why.

Detroit sits in a metro area of about 4.4 million people, and plenty of businesses in Dearborn, Southfield and the Pointes also chase Detroit searches. Some will have more reviews and older websites than you.

I focus on what Google can confirm. A Google Business Profile with the right primary category, every service listed and a steady flow of new reviews. Your name, address and phone number matching exactly across your site, Google, Yelp, Apple Maps and the directories in your trade. Service pages that answer the questions Detroit customers ask, written for a reader first. And links from Detroit organizations, neighborhood groups and local press where you’ve earned them. A competitor in Southfield can’t move its address into the city, and Google weighs that in Maps.

Usually not. Most Detroit sites I audit can be fixed: titles, a page for each service, speed on a phone, schema, redirects. Early months usually go to that foundation, plus the profile and the listings that disagree with each other. Later months shift toward new content, reviews and links, aimed at the parts of the city where your map rankings are weakest.

If the site is so slow or so locked into a page builder that fixing it costs more than replacing it, I’ll say so before you spend a month on patches. I also do web design for Detroit businesses, but I won’t sell you a site to make the SEO easier for me.

Manager access to your Google Business Profile. Photos of real jobs, real trucks and real people in Detroit, because stock photos don’t prove you work here. A short list of the neighborhoods your customers come from and the ones you want more of. A few minutes a month to ask happy customers for a review, with a link I give you. And answers to a handful of questions when I write a page, since the details that make a page rank come from you.