Choosing a Search Plan for Your Services

The quickest way to pick a plan is arithmetic. Write down the services you want to be found for, multiply by the places you want to be found in, and compare the result with each plan's keyword count: Starter covers 5 keywords, Neighborhood 10 and Citywide 20. A one-service business working one area usually fits Starter. A plumber with four services in three localities lands at about 12, which puts it between Neighborhood and Citywide, and settling that kind of tie is most of the work.

Write two short lists

Start with services, written the way a customer would type them. "Water heater replacement", not the package name on your invoice. Put down only the jobs you want more of. If you take drain calls but lose money on them, leave drains off. A plan that brings you more of the wrong work costs you twice: once for the plan, once for the jobs.

Then list places, using the names your customers use when they search. Those aren't always the names on your paperwork. A homeowner in Mechanicsville may type "plumber mechanicsville" long before "plumber Hanover County". Around Richmond, a place can be the city itself, a county (Henrico, Chesterfield, Hanover), or a community inside one, such as Glen Allen, Midlothian, Chester or Mechanicsville. Keep the list to places you'll actually drive to on a Tuesday afternoon, the same rule that applies to the service areas on your Business Profile (how that list works for a business that hides its address).

Multiply, then trim

Services times places gives you the number of pairs. Each pair is a candidate keyword: "drain cleaning glen allen", "water heater replacement ashland". Before you count them all, cross out the pairs that fail any of these tests:

• You'd turn the job down there, or the drive eats the margin.
• The place is so small that a page for the wider area already covers the few people who search it.
• Two pairs are really the same search. "Water heater repair" and "water heater replacement" often land on the same page. Count them once unless you sell and price them differently.

Close variations ride along with a target. A page built for "water heater replacement mechanicsville" can also show for "water heater installers near mechanicsville" without a separate keyword. So the count is the set of phrases you'd build pages toward, not every way a person might type them.

Worked example 1: one service, one area

Say you tune and repair pianos, you only take jobs inside the city of Richmond, and you trade under a name we'll call Middle C Tuning. Your service list has one real line, tuning, with repair as a close second. Your place list has one line, Richmond, plus a couple of neighborhoods where you'd like more calls.

Your targets might be:

1. piano tuning richmond
2. piano tuner richmond va
3. piano repair richmond
4. in-home piano tuning richmond
5. piano tuning museum district

Five targets, five keywords. Starter fits, at $65 a month, or $75 for one month only, with no subscription. A bigger plan would mostly buy keyword slots you have nothing to put in yet.

Worked example 2: four services, three places

Say you run a two-truck plumbing company based in Mechanicsville that we'll call Copper Elbow Plumbing. You want more of four jobs: water heater replacement, drain cleaning, leak repair and sump pump installation. You serve three areas: Mechanicsville, Ashland and Glen Allen.

Four times three is 12 pairs. Now trim. Say Glen Allen is the far edge of your area and a sump pump job there isn't worth the truck time, and say you rarely sell sump pumps in Ashland either. Cross out those two pairs and you have 10.

At 10, Neighborhood fits exactly, at $125 a month, or $140 for one month only. If you keep all 12, or you also want the plain trade terms ("plumber mechanicsville", "plumber ashland va"), you're past 10 and into Citywide's 20, at $235 a month, or $260 for one month only. The leftover slots on Citywide aren't waste. They hold the trade terms and leave room for a fourth area later.

The deciding question for Copper Elbow is simple. If trimming only costs jobs you don't care about, take Neighborhood. If every pair is work you want, or you plan to grow into Henrico, take Citywide.

What the extra money buys beyond keywords

Keyword count is the easy comparison, but each step up also adds link work, and Citywide adds research.

	Starter	Neighborhood	Citywide
Monthly (one month only, no subscription)	$65 ($75)	$125 ($140)	$235 ($260)
Keywords	5	10	20
Guest posts on DA 20+ sites	5	10	20
Web 2.0 properties on DA 50+ platforms	5	10	20
Amplification links	1,500	3,000	5,000
Turnaround	8-10 days	10-12 days	12-14 days

In plain terms: guest posts are articles placed through outreach on other websites, each linking to yours. Web 2.0s are pages we publish on high-authority publishing platforms, pointing to your site. Amplification links are second-tier links pointing at those guest posts and Web 2.0 pages, not at your site, to strengthen them and get them indexed.

Citywide also adds four things that aren't links:

• In-depth keyword research. Instead of working only from your list, we check which of your pairs people actually search and look for phrasings you didn't think of. For Copper Elbow, that could show one of the 12 pairs barely gets searched while a phrasing you never wrote down does.
• An on-page audit of the pages you already have: titles, headings, whether each service has its own page, and whether each area page says anything specific to that area.
• Content gap analysis: which services and places have no page at all, compared with what people search for and what competing pages cover.
• Premium indexing for the links built for you.

For a business with five targets and a two-page site, those extras have little to work on. For a business with a dozen targets and a site that lumps every service onto one page, the audit and the gap analysis can matter more than the extra links.

One thing doesn't change between tiers. Every plan, Starter included, has the same local base: Google Business Profile optimization, citation building and cleanup, and review-generation work, so a smaller plan doesn't mean a neglected map listing.

When the count and the budget disagree

If your count says Citywide and your budget says Starter, pick the five pairs with the best margin and start there. Plans run month to month with no contract, so starting small doesn't lock you in, and the pairs you set aside stay on your list for later. If the same budget also has to cover ads, splitting a small marketing budget between SEO and Google Ads walks through one way to divide it and measure each side.

Resist the shortcut of squeezing a 12-pair business into five broad phrases like "plumber richmond" and hoping the rest follow. Google says local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, and a shop in Mechanicsville is a long way from someone searching in Manchester or Midlothian. Specific pairs near where you work are where a small plan has the best chance to move.

If you'd rather not do the multiplication by hand, the metro coverage planner does it: pick your services and the localities you serve, and it names the smallest plan that covers them.

Once you have your number, check it against the full plan-by-plan list on our pricing page, which shows everything each tier includes. Ordering starts with a request; we email a payment link, and nothing is charged before that.