Why your phone goes quiet in the shoulder seasons.

October 15, 2026

By Lasse Pettersen

Every spring and fall I hear the same thing from renovators outside the big cities:  the work was steady all summer, and then the phone just stopped. The usual reaction is to spend more on ads. And while ads can help, most of the time the real problem is a lot cheaper to fix: how the business shows up on Google Maps.

When a homeowner in the Ontario communities of Collingwood, Wasaga Beach or Thornbury searches “bathroom renovation near me,” Google shows a small map with three businesses under it. That box is called the map pack, and it’s where a lot of local calls start. If you’re not in those three spots for the towns you work in, you’re invisible to the people who are ready to hire right now. Three things decide whether you get in: your Google business profile, how clearly you tell Google where you work, and how steadily new reviews come in.

1. Your Google business profile
Your GBP is the free listing that puts your company on Google Maps and in the map pack. If you’ve ever seen your business name on a map with your phone number and reviews, that’s your profile. Plenty of contractors set it up years ago and never touched it again (I see this in almost every audit I do).

Start with the basics:

• Main category. This is the single most important setting. If you mostly do kitchens and basements, choose a category that says so, not a broad one that fits any contractor. A “General contractor” label when almost every job is kitchens will lose you to the company that picked “Kitchen remodeler.”
• Real photos. Post photos of your own jobs, before and after, with your trucks and crew. Stock images don’t help. Fresh photos show Google and homeowners that you’re active. A photo from last week’s tile job in Stayner beats a brochure shot from 2019.
• Services in plain words. List your services the way customers actually search. “Basement renovation” and “kitchen remodel” beat “interior solutions.”

Current hours and phone. If someone calls the number on your profile and nobody answers, that call goes to the next company in the box.

None of this costs anything. It just takes an hour.

2. Service-area clarity

Service-area clarity means telling Google exactly which towns you work in. A lot of profiles say something like “Ontario” or “southern Ontario,” or list nothing at all. That’s too vague for Google to know where to show you.

Name the real towns you serve, both on your profile and on your website. A renovator based in Collingwood might list Collingwood, Wasaga Beach, Thornbury, Stayner and Meaford. If you work out of your truck or home and don’t have a storefront, you can hide your street address and just show those towns. That’s normal and allowed.

Be honest about it. Listing every town within 200 kilometres doesn’t help you and can hurt you. Stick to the places you’d actually drive to for a job, and make sure your website mentions them too, ideally with a few photos or short write-ups of work you’ve done there.

Here’s what that looks like in practice. Say you’re based in Collingwood and you regularly take jobs in Wasaga Beach and Thornbury, but your profile and website only talk about Collingwood. A homeowner searching “kitchen renovation Wasaga Beach” may never see you, even if you’d be there tomorrow. Once those towns are named on the profile and you have a short page or photo set showing work in each place, Google has a reason to show you there. The opposite is also true: naming Barrie when you almost never drive that far rarely puts you on the Barrie map. Google still leans hard on distance. Naming a town can get you into the search results; it doesn’t guarantee a map pack spot an hour from your shop.

So name the towns you serve, but put most of your effort into the ones closest to your base. If a town further out really matters to you, that’s a bigger decision (a second location, for example) than one more line on your profile.

3. Review cadence

Review cadence is how steadily you get new Google reviews. Some people also refer to this as “velocity.” Many contractors get a burst of reviews during a busy stretch and then nothing for months. To a homeowner looking at your profile in November, a business whose newest review is from last spring can look like it’s slowed down or closed, even if you just finished three kitchens in October and never asked anyone to leave a review.

Recent reviews matter to customers, and while Google doesn’t publish exactly how it weighs them, they tend to matter to local rankings as well. A few new reviews every month does more for you than twenty in one week and then silence.

The easiest way to build that habit is to ask on the day the job wraps up, while the homeowner is happy and standing in their new kitchen. Send a text with a direct link to your review page – make it one tap. Then reply to every review you get, good or bad, in a calm and professional way. Other homeowners read those replies.

The shoulder seasons are when gaps in your reviews show up the most, and they’re also a good time to catch up. Reach out to clients from the summer who never left a review and ask politely. One text to five happy clients in October often does more than waiting until spring when you’re slammed again.

A five-minute checklist before you buy more ads

Before you put more money into ads this fall, open your Google Business Profile and check these:

• Is your main category the closest match to the work you most want?
• Have you added photos from a job in the last month?
• Are the towns you actually serve listed by name?
• Do you have a habit of asking for a review on the day each job finishes?
• Are your hours and phone number correct, and does someone answer that phone?

If you can’t say yes to all five, fix those first. Ads send people to your profile, and if the profile isn’t doing its job, you’re paying to send people somewhere that doesn’t convince them to call.

The slow months don’t have to be slow. Often the contractors who stay busy in April and November aren’t the ones spending the most – they’re the ones homeowners can find on the map, in the right towns, with reviews from last week.