What do you guarantee, and what will you not promise?
Agency credentials pages usually list certifications and awards. Those are easy to accumulate and tell you very little about whether someone will do good work.
What follows is the more useful version: what we will not claim, what we do commit to, and what you keep.
What we will not promise
Rankings. Not first place, not the map pack, not a position by a date. Google states plainly on its own local ranking guidance that there is no way to pay for a better local ranking. Any agency promising a position is either describing an uncompetitive market or telling you something they cannot control.
Lead volume. We will not quote a number of leads per month. The providers who do are generally selling shared leads that reach your competitors at the same time.
Revenue. Marketing produces visibility and enquiries. What happens after the phone rings is your sales process, your pricing and your capacity, and we do not control any of them.
Speed. Local SEO takes months. Anyone offering meaningful organic results in weeks is describing either a very weak market or something else entirely.
AI citations. We will not promise that ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI features will cite your business. Google’s own guidance states that no special markup or machine-readable files are required to appear in its AI experiences, which also means nobody can sell you a shortcut into them.
What we do commit to
A defined scope in writing, so you can tell whether it happened.
A monthly geo-grid scan, sent whether it looks good or not. This is the mechanism that lets you hold us accountable, and it is the reason we lead with it rather than with a traffic chart.
Straight reporting. If a month went badly, the report says so and explains what we are changing. If three consecutive scans show nothing, we change the approach rather than the invoice.
Telling you when to stop. Including when the honest answer is that the work is not economic for your business, or that you should not have hired us in the first place. There are pages on this site devoted to exactly that, such as why some businesses should not buy this.
No contract lock-in. The work compounds, so leaving early wastes your money — but that is your calculation to make.
What you own
The Google Business Profile. The Google Ads account and its history. The analytics property and conversion configuration. The domain. The website and its code. Any content written for you.
We work with manager-level access wherever the platform allows it rather than taking ownership, so ending the relationship is a permissions change rather than a negotiation. Any provider asking to own your Business Profile or your ad account should be asked why.
Practices we refuse
We do not buy links or participate in link schemes, both of which Google’s spam policies name directly and both of which put the client’s site at risk rather than the agency’s.
We do not buy, incentivise or gate reviews. Offering payment or discounts for reviews breaches Google’s review policies and US regulators treat suppressing negative reviews as deceptive.
We do not add keywords to business names or use addresses a client does not operate from, both of which are common causes of profile suspension.
We do not build dozens of near-identical city pages, which Google’s spam policies address under doorway abuse.
None of these are close calls. They are the four things most commonly sold to local businesses that carry real downside for the client.
What we have not published here
We have deliberately not put numbers on this page that we have not verified — client counts, average ranking improvements, retention rates or a review score. Where a figure would belong, you will find a visible placeholder rather than an estimate.
That is a deliberate choice. A trust page that invents its own evidence is worse than one that admits what is not yet documented.
REVIEW PROOF TODO: verified Google review count and rating to be added once confirmed. CASE STUDY TODO: documented client outcomes with methodology, date range and consent.
The business itself
Quality1Direct has operated as an internet marketing service in Ann Arbor since 2010, working with service businesses across Washtenaw County and Metro Detroit. It is a service-area business, so there is no walk-in office and no street address is published — which is what Google’s guidelines direct service-area businesses to do.
The person who audits your market is the person who does the work. That is a constraint on how many clients we take rather than a marketing claim.
Call 734-747-3922 or request a free audit, and ask us what we will not do for you.
This page sits above the individual services. The work it describes is set out on our internet marketing service pages for Ann Arbor.