The map pack gets the click before your website ever loads. Here's the fence-specific GBP guide — setup in an afternoon, then a one-hour weekly habit that out-ranks incumbents.

Setup (do once, do completely)

  • Category: primary "Fence Contractor" — exact, not "Contractor." Secondaries as they truly apply (e.g., Concrete Contractor, Deck Builder) — and only as they apply; category stuffing risks suspension.
  • Service-area business: if you work from home, hide the address and set your service area by city/town list (we list each village and city by name, not a mile radius). You can rank fine as an SAB; thousands of contractors do.
  • Services list: add each service as its own entry with a description — vinyl privacy fence, fence replacement, gates, steel-reinforced posts. These map to searches.
  • The basics that get skipped: hours (set them honestly — "open 24 hours" looks fake), phone that answers or auto-texts, website link, appointment link (your instant-quote page), business description front-loading what and where ("Vinyl fence installation with steel-reinforced posts serving your area…").
  • 20+ photos before launch: real jobs, the truck, you. Geotagged-looking stock imagery is worse than fewer real photos.

Ranking — what actually moves the needle, in rough order

  1. Proximity (can't control), relevance (your category/services — controlled above), and prominence — which for a local trade mostly means reviews and activity.
  2. Review velocity and recency. A steady drip of fresh reviews signals an alive business. This is the new company's unfair advantage: incumbents with hundreds of reviews from 2018 are beatable by 25 reviews from the last 90 days. Ask every customer, in person, at the walkthrough. Respond to every review within 24 hours — including the bad one, calmly and specifically; prospective customers read your responses more carefully than the reviews themselves.
  3. Photo freshness. 3–5 new job photos weekly. Caption with neighborhood-level locality where natural.
  4. Weekly Posts. Treat GBP posts like a mini-feed: this week's install, a before/after, a seasonal note ("booking final pre-snow installs"). Two minutes each.
  5. Q&A — seed it yourself. Anyone can ask and answer, so ask the eight questions every homeowner has (cost range, timeline, permits, post depth, financing, warranty) and answer them as the owner. You've just put a FAQ in the map pack.
  6. Consistency elsewhere: name/address/phone identical across your website, Facebook, Nextdoor, and the data aggregators. Mismatches quietly erode trust signals.

What to ignore: review-buying services (suspension risk and it's fraud), keyword-stuffed business names ("Kodiak Fence Co Best Fence Company Green Bay" — against guidelines and tacky), and anyone selling "guaranteed #1 map ranking."

The honest timeline: a new profile takes 2–4 months of consistent activity to crack the map pack for "fence company + city." The weekly hour is boring and it is the entire game. Set a Friday calendar block: photos up, post published, reviews responded, this week's customers asked.

Every Fenceworks job wraps with a photo set and a review ask in the workflow — the GBP habit, systematized: See how →

Written by Rob Diederich, founder of Fenceworks.ai and Kodiak Fence Co.

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