01
Your profile is the ad
A homeowner decides in about ten seconds whether to call you. Almost all of that decision is made on your profile page, and almost all of it is fixable in one sitting.
Write your own tagline.
One line under your business name. Ours is generic because we wrote it about you from the outside. Yours can say the thing you actually want the job for — "Second-generation, Midland County, no subs."
ProfilePut your name and face on it.
Owner name, a short bio, a headshot. Every trade in your category has a logo and a phone number. Far fewer have a person, and a homeowner letting someone into the house is deciding about a person.
ProfileList the services you want more of, not all of them.
The list is what you get matched and searched on. A roofer who lists gutters, siding and chimney flashing gets asked about gutters, siding and chimney flashing.
ProfileSet your service area to where you will actually drive.
This decides which city pages you appear on. Wide enough to get found, honest enough that you are not turning down half of what comes in.
ProfileAdd certifications and the year you started.
Two fields, thirty seconds, and they are the two a homeowner comparing three quotes actually reads.
Profile
02
Photos are the part they scroll
Homeowners open the pictures before they read a word. What you upload is the closest thing to letting them walk a job you finished.
Get your logo right first.
The logo is what renders on your card everywhere in the directory — search results, category pages, city pages. Photos do not appear there. If the logo is blurry or missing, that is the one image most homeowners ever see of you.
PhotosUpload finished work, not trucks and not equipment.
A homeowner is imagining their own house done. A photo of your trailer does not help them do that.
PhotosShoot in daylight, from where a person would stand.
Phone cameras are fine. Bad light and a crooked angle are what make a good job look like a cheap one.
Put the best one first.
The gallery runs in the order you set. The first frame is the one that decides whether they swipe.
Photos
Community Listed businesses can have one video, and it has to be the intro. That is enforced in the database, so extra uploads are refused rather than quietly hidden. Verified Pros have no video limit.
03
Answer the same day
A homeowner asking for a quote has almost always asked more than one business. The job usually goes to whoever gets back first with a real answer, not to whoever is cheapest.
Check Quote Requests once in the morning and once at the end of the day.
New requests carry an unread marker until you open them. Two looks a day is enough to never be the third callback.
Quote RequestsReply even when the answer is no.
Passing on a job takes ten seconds and puts the homeowner back on the road instead of waiting on you. They remember which one of the three was straight with them.
Quote RequestsGive a number or a next step, not just availability.
"I can come Thursday" is a reply. "Jobs like this usually run $800–$1,200, and I can look Thursday" is the one that gets a yes.
Check the tab rather than waiting to be told. We do not currently send you an email or a text when a request comes in, and a pro who is waiting for one is a pro who finds out three days late.
04
Google reviews do the heavy lifting
Your Google rating is both what we check you against and what decides where you land when a homeowner searches without us. It is the highest-leverage thing on this page.
Ask at the end of the job, in person, before you leave.
A review asked for face to face while the work is in front of them lands far more often than one asked for by email three days later.
Send the link the same hour.
Say you will text it, then text it from the driveway. The ask and the link arriving together is most of the difference.
Answer the bad one.
A calm reply to a one-star does more for the next homeowner reading it than the one-star costs you. They are reading how you handle a problem, because that is what they are afraid of.
Make it somebody's job.
Fifteen reviews is the bar for verification and most businesses clear it in a season once one person owns the ask.
The rating shown on your MI Home Hub profile is updated by our team, not pulled from Google automatically, so it can sit a little behind. If yours looks stale, tell us and we will refresh it.
05
Read your own numbers
Analytics is three questions: how many people opened your page, how many then reached for the phone, and which of those is moving.
Look at profile views over 30 days, not 7.
Seven days in a trade business is mostly noise. Thirty is long enough to see a direction.
AnalyticsWatch the gap between views and phone clicks.
Plenty of views and almost no clicks means people are finding you and then deciding against you — and that is a profile problem, which is the one kind of problem on this page you can fix yourself in an afternoon.
AnalyticsCheck where the traffic came from.
Tells you whether the Hub is bringing you people or mostly serving the ones you already sent there yourself.
Analytics
A profile view means one person opened your page — repeat visits from the same browsing session are counted once, and traffic we can identify as bots is left out. Your own visits to your own listing never count, so you can look as often as you like.
06
Use what you are already paying for
Four things come with the listing that most pros never open. None of them cost extra and none of them need unlocking.
Spend the perks.
Suppliers and services around Mid-Michigan give Hub pros a better rate than their walk-in price. No card, no points, no expiry unless the perk says so. For a lot of businesses this covers the monthly fee on its own.
Pro PerksShow up in the Community once.
Feed, events, members and the learning library, all Verified Pros only. The referrals that come out of it are between pros who have met, which is the kind that actually turns into work.
CommunityPost what you are hiring for.
People looking for work in the trades locally, in one place, without a job board fee.
TalentName a contractor you would vouch for.
The directory is worth more to homeowners the more of it is good, and a pro you would put your own name behind is a better signal than anything we can check from the outside.
Referrals
07
When it is worth buying more visibility
There are four paid add-ons. They are worth it in specific situations and a waste in others, so here is the honest version of each.
Category Spotlight — $250/month.
Top of your category for the month. Worth it when your trade has a season and you know which month it is: snow and ice in November, HVAC in the first hot week, roofing after a storm. Buying it in your slow month is buying attention from people who are not looking.
Newsletter Feature — $200 one-time.
One slot in the monthly homeowner newsletter. Best used when you have something to actually say — a new service, a seasonal offer, a milestone. Without that it reads as a business card.
Co-Branded Story — $500 one-time.
We produce a feature article or short video about your business. This is the one to buy when your problem is that nobody has heard of you, rather than that nobody can find you.
Homepage Rotation — $400/month.
Top-of-funnel and limited inventory. It suits businesses that serve every homeowner in the region rather than one trade niche.
None of these change how quote requests are routed to you, and there are no per-lead fees on any plan. They buy attention, not preference.
08
If you are still Community Listed
A Community Listed business is in the directory and findable. It does not show a phone number, and we do not route quote requests to it. Here is the whole bar for changing that.
Licensed and insured.
We check both ourselves before anything goes live.
Two years under the same business name.
Tenure under the name, not years in the trade.
4.2 or better, with at least 15 reviews.
On Google. This is the one most businesses are short on, and the one that moves fastest once you start asking.
Working inside the seven counties.
Midland, Bay, Saginaw, Isabella, Gratiot, Clare and Gladwin.
That is the whole list. Not everybody clears it the first time, and it is not held against anybody — you keep the free Community listing and you get a straight answer about what is short, with the actual number. Fix it, come back, and we run it again.