We’re Starting a Garage Door Company. Here’s What I Found When I Searched for It.

I’ve been doing SEO for other people’s service businesses for a while now — HVAC, plumbing, electrical, restoration. It’s a strange job, because you’re always one step removed from the consequences. If a campaign works, the client’s phone rings. If it doesn’t, you have a meeting about it.

Now my family is starting a garage door company. My dad runs it. I’m putting up the money for the marketing and doing the work myself. For the first time the phone that does or doesn’t ring is ours.

I’m going to write down what happens, as it happens, including the parts that don’t work. This is entry one.

Why I’m not telling you the company name yet

We aren’t registered yet, so we can’t legally take a paying job — and I’m not going to point you at a business that can’t do work.

Washington requires contractors to register with Labor & Industries. For a single-trade operation like ours that means a specialty registration rather than a general one: a $15,000 surety bond, liability insurance, a UBI number, and a two-year registration fee. Bond amounts went up on July 1, 2024, so any figure you find in an older article is wrong. There’s no exam and no experience verification, which surprises people, but the bond and insurance are real money and they have to be in place before the registration is active.

There’s a second reason to wait. Washington law requires a contractor to display their registration number in advertising, and a website is advertising. Publishing a company name and a phone number before the number exists would mean either advertising without one or making one up. Neither is a good first act.

So: entries one through however-many are about the part nobody writes about, which is everything that happens before you’re open.

The first thing I did was search for us

There was nothing, obviously. That’s not the interesting part.

The interesting part is what was there. I ran searches for garage door repair and installation across the towns we intend to serve, with the location set to each town rather than to my desk, and wrote down every business in the map results along with its review count. That’s it. No tools, no subscriptions. It took an afternoon.

Here is what came back on July 29, 2026.

Read the bolded numbers. A company with 18 reviews holds a top map position in two different towns. Another takes first place in Washougal on 25. A company with 11 shows up third in Battle Ground.

The finding: review moats are city-shaped, not region-shaped

Ponderosa has 1,334 reviews at 4.9 stars and twenty-seven years of history. It takes Vancouver. It is completely absent from the Camas repair results and from Washougal.

I want to be careful here, because this isn’t a knock on them — 1,334 reviews is an extraordinary number and they’ve clearly earned it. The point is what it does and doesn’t buy. It buys Vancouver. It does not buy a county.

The reason is that distance is one of the three things Google weighs in local results, and it’s measured from a business’s actual location. Reviews are prominence; they help you win when you’re already in the running. They don’t move your pin. A company twenty minutes outside the town someone is searching from is competing at a structural disadvantage no amount of reviews fully erases.

You can see them acting on this themselves: Ponderosa runs a separate Google listing for Battle Ground with its own address and its own 182 reviews. They understand the geography problem well enough to have built a second location for it. And their own satellite proves the finding — the parent listing’s 1,334 reviews didn’t carry over to it. It had to earn 182 of its own.

What I got wrong before I looked

I want this log to be honest about the misses, so here’s the first one.

I assumed the national franchises would be the problem. Two of them operate here, both with real marketing budgets and in-house SEO teams. Going in, I had them written down as the reason this market would be hard. That was lazy pattern-matching on my part — big brand, big budget, therefore dangerous.

Then I read their pages. One of the national franchises files a Washington city under Oregon in its own URL structure and titles the page with the wrong state abbreviation. That is not a company that is going to lose sleep over a local operator who gets the details right. Budget is not the same thing as attention, and in local search, attention is most of the job.

I also found a cluster of sites ranking on the long tail with exact-match domains, tracking phone numbers, no business name, no address, and no license number anywhere. Lead resellers. They’re real competition for the click, but they’re not real competition for the customer, because the moment someone wants to know who is actually coming to their house, there’s nothing to find.

What we’re actually going to do

Nothing clever. The data pointed somewhere obvious:

1. Don’t open in Vancouver. Fighting a 27-year, 1,334-review incumbent in its home city, on day one, with zero reviews, is a choice to lose slowly. We’ll get there. Not first.
2. Treat reviews as the number-one operational task, with a realistic target. The evidence says the entry threshold in the smaller towns is somewhere in the range of 18 to 25 reviews — not hundreds. That’s a six-month project for a company doing good work, not a multi-year one. It reframes the whole thing from “impossible” to “scheduled.”
3. Get the Google listing right before the website. We’ll be a service-area business working out of a property rather than a storefront, which means the street address has to be hidden on the profile. A visible residential address is one of the most common causes of suspension, and Google re-checks listings against public property data shortly after verification.
4. Register first. Bond, insurance, L&I, UBI, in that order, before a single ad or a single job.

That’s the plan on day one. I fully expect to be revising parts of it in public.

Why I’m publishing this at all

Partly because it’s useful. The review-moat finding took an afternoon to establish and it’s the kind of thing I’d normally only produce inside a paid engagement.

Mostly, though, because I think there’s a difference between an agency that has read about local search and one that has had to make it work for money it can’t afford to lose. I’ve been the first for a few years. This is me becoming the second, and writing it down either way.

If you run a service business and any of this sounds like your situation, the guides section has the version written for you rather than about me — starting with why a company doesn’t show up on Google Maps, which covers the same distance-and-prominence mechanics from the other direction.

Next entry

Setting up the Google Business Profile — every field, what I chose, and why. Including the two settings I think most contractors get wrong, one of which I only understood properly while writing this.