SEO Services in Lowell, MA

As your SEO agency in Lowell, we follow the same three steps for every client: find the keywords your ideal customers search for, build content around those keywords and the services you actually offer, then earn links from other websites that point back to you. Then we measure, adjust, and repeat.

Lowell SEO: What Ranking Looks Like in the Mill City

Lowell grew up around water power, and the city still runs on connections: the canals that fed the mills, the commuter rail that carries workers toward Boston, Route 3 and I-495 pulling traffic through the Merrimack Valley. Search works the same way. Customers flow along the paths Google lays out, and the businesses sitting on the busiest paths get the most calls. Ranking in Lowell means holding a spot on the paths your customers already travel.

Those paths are local and specific. Someone in the Highlands types the name of the service plus Lowell. Someone in Dracut or Chelmsford searches for the nearest option and lets Google sort by distance. A UMass Lowell student looks for a late-night restaurant downtown, while a facilities manager at one of the mill-building offices looks for a commercial cleaning company by name. Each of those searches is a small market of its own, and a page that speaks to one of them precisely will beat a generic page every time. That is why our SEO services in Lowell are built town by town and service by service, instead of as one broad campaign that treats the whole valley as a single audience.

The old blog post that used to sit at this address understood the shape of the problem: Lowell's mix of history, culture, and a growing, diverse economy makes it a good place to do business, and a hard place to stand out online. That has not changed. What has changed is how much of the decision happens before anyone visits your website. The map pack, the review stars, the first lines of your service page — that is where Lowell customers now decide. Our job is to win that moment, over and over, for the services that pay your bills.

Why Local Search Decides Who Gets the Call in Lowell

Walk down Merrimack Street and count the businesses that do what you do within a few blocks. Then remember that every one of them is also competing with the shops in Chelmsford, Tewksbury, and Billerica that Google is happy to show a Lowell searcher. Local search is the filter that sorts that crowd, and it sorts ruthlessly: the top three map results take most of the calls, and the first page of organic results takes most of the rest.

Lowell customers are practical about it. A landlord with a vacant unit in the Acre wants a painter this week, not a lesson in painting. A family in Centralville wants a pediatrician who takes their insurance and has an opening. They search, they scan, they call. If your business is not in that first view, you are not in the running at all — no matter how good your work is once the customer finds you.

That is why local visibility is not a vanity project for a Lowell business. It is the front door. The businesses that treat it that way — keeping their profile current, their reviews fresh, their service pages specific to the neighborhoods they serve — are the ones whose phones keep ringing while competitors wonder where the work went. Our SEO experts watch that front door the way a shopkeeper watches the street: who walked past, who came in, and what made them choose the door next door instead.

There is a second reason the stakes are high in Lowell. The city draws customers from well beyond its borders — students and staff at UMass Lowell, visitors to the ballpark and the Tsongas Center, workers commuting along Route 3 and I-495. Those people search like outsiders: they type the service and the city, they trust the map, and they rarely give a business a second chance to be found. A Lowell business that ranks for those searches is not just winning local work; it is winning the whole flow of people moving through the Merrimack Valley.

What a Lowell SEO Campaign Covers

A campaign for a Lowell business has to cover the whole journey a customer takes, from the first search to the phone call. That journey usually starts on a phone, often with a map result, and it ends when the customer decides your business looks like the safest choice. Every piece of the campaign exists to make that decision easier.

Local visibility first

Your Google Business Profile is your storefront on the map. We make sure the categories, services, hours, and service area are accurate, that the photos look like the business a customer will actually walk into, and that new reviews are answered. Around that, we keep your name, address, and phone number consistent across the directories Lowell customers and Google both check, so the search engine trusts that you are who you say you are, where you say you are.

Pages that match real searches

Then come the pages. A Lowell roofing company needs a page for roof replacement, a page for repairs, and a page for the towns it serves — each one written around the words customers type, not around the words the industry uses internally. A law office near the courthouse needs pages for each practice area, written for the person in trouble, not for other lawyers. We build those pages from keyword research, so every page has a job and a searcher waiting for it.

Authority that compounds

Finally, links and mentions from other websites tell Google that Lowell trusts you. An SEO company earns that trust the same way a local business does — by being mentioned by the organizations, publications, and partners that matter in the city. A mention in a local publication, a listing with a neighborhood association, a link from a supplier or a partner — each one is a small vote. We earn those votes steadily, and we measure the result in rankings, calls, and form fills, not in reports full of numbers nobody reads.

Why Lowell Businesses Choose Revenue Boomers

Lowell business owners have heard plenty of SEO pitches. Most of them sound the same: big promises, vague timelines, a monthly report nobody can explain. We do the opposite. You get a plain-language plan, a short list of what we are doing this month and why, and numbers you can check yourself in your own call log.

That plain approach fits Lowell. This is a working city — mill buildings converted into offices, family restaurants that have fed the same streets for decades, contractors who built their name one job at a time. People here can tell the difference between work and talk. So we show the work: the keyword research with real search volumes, the pages we wrote and why, the links we earned, and the ranking movement that followed.

We also stay honest about what SEO cannot do. It will not fix a business that does not answer its phone, and it will not outrank a competitor overnight. As a Lowell SEO firm, we would rather tell you that on the first call than discover it three months into a campaign. What good SEO does, done properly, is put a good Lowell business in front of more of the right people, month after month, until the compounding effect shows up in the revenue line. That is the result our clients stay for.

Our Proven SEO Process for Lowell Businesses

Every campaign we run in Lowell follows the same sequence, and as an SEO company we walk each client through it on the first call so there are no surprises later. It is a practical order of operations, not a mystery.

Step one: audit the site as it stands

We start by looking at what you already have. The audit checks how your site is built, how fast it loads on a phone, whether Google can crawl and index your pages, and which searches you already rank for. Most Lowell sites we audit are already doing something right — the audit finds the gaps instead of pretending nothing works.

Step two: research the keywords Lowell customers use

Next we build the keyword map. We identify the phrases your ideal customers search for, and we document how many people search for each one. A personal injury lawyer and a kitchen remodeler in the same city need completely different keyword maps, and a Lowell map looks different from a Boston map — the volumes are smaller, the intent is sharper, and the neighborhood names matter more.

Step three: build content around those keywords

Then we create the content: the home page, the service pages, the about and contact pages, and the blog posts that answer the questions customers ask before they call. Blogs are a core part of this step — they are how a business earns its way onto searches it could never justify a service page for, and they keep the site growing between bigger projects.

Step four: earn links and local authority

Content without authority is a billboard in an empty field. We pursue links from other websites and articles written about your company, drawing on access to more than 50,000 publisher websites, plus the local citations and directory listings that anchor a Lowell business to its place on the map.

Step five: measure, optimize, and repeat

Finally, we watch what happens and adjust. Rankings move, competitors react, Google changes the rules, and a service that was quiet in January gets busy in June. We keep optimizing the pages based on the keyword research, outranking competitors one search at a time, and the cycle starts again. That loop — research, content, links, optimize, repeat — is how a Lowell business climbs to the top and stays there.

Campaign examples: challenges, work and measurement

Two kinds of Lowell business show how the same process plays out differently. These are illustrative scenarios based on the patterns we see across the city, not reports on any single client. Both show the same idea: SEO services work best when they match the customer standing in front of the business.

A downtown restaurant competing for visitors

A family restaurant near the Lowell National Historical Park had steady regulars but almost no visitors from the Folk Festival crowds or the Tsongas Center. Its website named the cuisine but never the neighborhood, the park, or the events that bring thousands of people downtown. The challenge was seasonal and geographic: be found by people who do not know Lowell well and are deciding where to eat in the next hour. The work centered on the Google Business Profile — hours, menus, photos of the room — plus pages for the dishes visitors search for and content tied to downtown events. Success was measured in map views, direction requests, and covers on event weekends, not in a single ranking number.

A contractor serving the whole Merrimack Valley

A roofing and exterior contractor based in South Lowell did good work across Chelmsford, Dracut, and Tewksbury, but its website spoke only about Lowell. Homeowners in the surrounding towns searched for roofers near them and found competitors whose pages named their town. The challenge was coverage without dilution: one business, many towns, and a website that had to feel local in each of them. The work was service pages for each core job, location pages that described real work in each town, and citations that tied the company to the whole valley. Measurement was simple — calls from each town, tracked month by month, against the towns where the pages had gone live.

What Your Free Lowell SEO Consultation Covers

The free consultation is a working session, not a sales call. We open your website live on the call and walk through what a customer sees when they find you: the first impression, the load speed on a phone, the pages that exist and the ones that are missing. Then we look at where you rank for the searches that matter to your business, and we name the competitors sitting above you and what they are doing differently.

Come prepared with the basics: what you sell, who your best customers are, which neighborhoods and towns you want more work from, and what a new customer is worth to you. If you have access to your website and your Google Business Profile, have it handy — we can often spot the fix in the first few minutes. The consultation covers the full range of SEO services your business might need, from the quick technical fixes to the longer content plan, and you will leave the call with a short, honest list of what to do first, whether you hire us or take the list to someone else. That is the point: you should know exactly where you stand before you spend anything.

How Long SEO Takes in Lowell

Lowell is a mid-size market, and that cuts both ways. You are not fighting the pile of agencies and national brands that crowd Boston searches, but you are also not alone — every contractor, dentist, and law office in the Merrimack Valley wants the same top spots. In practice, a Lowell business with a sound website usually starts seeing movement within the first few months: more map impressions, a few service pages climbing onto the first page, more calls from the searches it already nearly ranked for. The bigger wins — the money keywords, the map pack for the most competitive services — tend to land after several months of steady work.

The honest answer is that the timeline depends on where you start. A new website with no history and no reviews takes longer than a ten-year-old Lowell business whose site just needs structure and content. A business in a crowded trade, like roofing or personal injury law, takes longer than a business in a quieter niche. What does not change is the shape of the curve: early work buys early visibility, and the gains stack as the content and the links accumulate. Businesses that quit after six weeks never see the part of the curve that pays.

What SEO Costs for a Lowell Business

There is no single price for SEO in Lowell, because no two Lowell businesses need the same work. A single-location service business with a small site and a clear set of services needs less than a multi-location company competing across the whole Merrimack Valley. What matters is what the work covers and what a new customer is worth to you.

Think about it from the other side. If a new client is worth several hundred dollars to your business, then a campaign that brings in a handful of extra clients a month has already paid for itself. If a single case or a single project is worth thousands, the math is even simpler. The businesses that get burned are the ones that buy the cheapest package on offer and get a monthly report full of activity and no new customers. Price is the wrong question on its own — the right question is what the work will do for your revenue, and whether the agency can show you.

Our engagements run month to month after the first 90 days, so you are never locked into a year of paying for work that is not producing. An SEO firm that charges by the month and reports on calls and jobs, rather than on activity, is easy to judge — and easy to leave if the judgment goes against it. The consultation is free, and the first thing we do on it is tell you whether SEO is even the right move for your business right now. Sometimes the honest answer is to fix the website first, or to get more reviews before spending on links. An SEO agency that tells you that on a free call is worth more than one that signs you up and figures it out later.

Choosing the Right SEO Partner in Lowell, Massachusetts

Choosing an SEO partner is a lot like hiring a contractor for your own building: the cheapest bid is rarely the best one, and the one who explains the work clearly is usually the one who does it well. Start with the proposal. A good one names the keywords, the pages, and the links — specific work, in plain language, tied to your business. A bad one talks about packages and promises first-page rankings without ever naming a search.

Watch for the red flags. Guarantees of a number-one ranking are a promise no honest agency can make, because Google decides the rankings. A proposal that never mentions your Google Business Profile is missing the part of local search that drives most calls. An agency that will not show you its work — the actual pages, the actual links — is asking you to pay for trust without evidence.

Ask how they measure success, and listen for the answer. Rankings matter, but they are a means, not the end. An SEO consultant worth hiring talks about calls, form fills, and booked jobs, and can show you the trail from a ranking to a customer. Ask who writes the content and whether it will sound like your business or like every other site they manage. Ask what happens if you leave — whether you keep the content and the site, or whether it all belongs to them. The answers to those questions tell you more than any sales deck will.

Your First 90 Days With an SEO Agency

The first 90 days set the pattern for everything that follows, so it helps to know what they look like. The first month is mostly foundation: the audit, the keyword research, the fixes to the technical problems that are holding the site back, and the cleanup of the Google Business Profile. You will not see dramatic ranking jumps in month one, and any agency that promises them is selling something else.

Month two is when the content starts landing. New service pages go live, the first blog posts publish, and the early links start to register. This is also when the first small wins usually show up — a page that was stuck on page two moves onto page one, a map listing starts getting more views, a search you had never ranked for starts sending a call or two.

By month three, the picture is clear enough to judge. You should be able to see movement in the searches that matter, a growing list of pages doing real work, and a call log that reflects it. That is the point of the 90-day start: it is long enough to prove the approach and short enough that you are never trapped. After that, the engagement runs month to month, and the work shifts from building the foundation to compounding it.

Start With Your Customer and Your Service Area

Every good Lowell campaign starts with two things: who the best customer is, and where that customer lives. A dentist in Belvidere and a commercial landscaper based in South Lowell have almost nothing in common except a city — different customers, different searches, different towns worth targeting. The campaign has to be built around the answer, not around a generic list of services.

That is why we map the service area before we write a word. Lowell itself breaks into distinct pockets — Downtown, the Acre, Belvidere, Pawtucketville, Centralville, the Highlands, South Lowell — and the towns around it each behave differently. Chelmsford and Westford lean residential and family-driven. Dracut and Tewksbury send steady contractor and home-service searches. Billerica and Andover bring in commercial work. Lawrence and Haverhill add volume to the valley. A page that names the town and describes the work done there will always outperform a page that lists towns like a phone book.

The customer matters just as much as the geography. A homeowner searching at 9 p.m. for an emergency plumber is not reading a blog post — they want a phone number and a promise of a fast response. A facilities manager choosing a cleaning company is reading case details and checking references. The pages, the calls to action, and even the keywords change with the customer, and the campaign is built to match.

Build a Service Page That Answers Real Objections

Most service pages fail in the same quiet way: they describe the service and stop. The customer reading them is not wondering what the service is — they are wondering whether to trust you with their home, their case, or their business. A good page answers the objections before they are asked.

For a Lowell contractor, the objections are practical: how much will it cost, how long will it take, will the crew show up on time, what happens if something goes wrong. For a lawyer, they are about trust: have you handled a case like mine, what does the process look like, what will it cost me. For a dentist, they are about comfort and coverage: do you take my insurance, can I get an appointment this week, will it hurt. Each of those questions deserves a direct answer on the page, in plain language, with the specifics of your business — not a paragraph of filler that could belong to anyone.

That is also where local detail earns its keep. A page that mentions the mill buildings, the canal walks, the neighborhoods you actually work in, and the kinds of homes and businesses you serve in Lowell reads like it was written by someone who knows the city. Customers can tell the difference, and so can Google. Specific pages rank; generic pages do not.

A Technical Review Before Adding Another Page

Adding pages to a broken website is like adding rooms to a house with a cracked foundation. Before we write new content for a Lowell business, we check the technical basics: how fast the site loads on a phone, whether it works properly on mobile at all, whether Google can crawl the pages that matter, and whether the pages it has already indexed are the ones worth ranking.

Lowell customers search overwhelmingly on their phones — standing in a kitchen with a leak, sitting in a car outside a job site, waiting in a school pickup line. A site that takes too long to load or that buries the phone number loses those people before they ever read a word. Speed and mobile usability are not technical niceties; they are the difference between a call and a bounce.

The review also catches the quiet problems: duplicate pages competing with each other, old blog posts ranking for searches the business no longer wants, service pages that exist but were never linked from anywhere. Fixing those first makes every page we add afterward work harder, because Google can finally see the site as a coherent whole instead of a pile of disconnected pages.

Reviews, Reputation, and Getting Found in AI Search

Reviews are the loudest signal in local search, and Lowell is a city where word of mouth still travels fast. A customer who had a good experience with a roofer in the Highlands will tell their neighbors; a customer who had a bad one will tell everyone. Google listens to both. Businesses with more recent, detailed reviews show up more often in the map results, and the review text itself helps Google understand what the business is good at.

Getting reviews is a process, not a hope. We help clients build a simple habit: ask every happy customer, make it easy with a direct link, and answer every review — good or bad — promptly and like a human. A thoughtful reply to a bad review does more for a business than a dozen five-star reviews with no replies at all. It shows the next customer reading the profile that the owner is paying attention.

AI search is the newest place that reputation shows up. When someone asks a chat assistant who the best roofer in Lowell is, the answer is drawn from the same material Google has always used: your pages, your reviews, your mentions around the web. The SEO experts who manage a campaign today have to write for that reader too — the machine that summarizes — and the way to do it is the same as ever: clear pages, specific claims, and a review record that backs them up. The businesses that already have that material are the ones AI quotes. There is no trick to it — it is the same work, in a new place.

Link Building and Local Authority in Lowell

Links are how Google decides whether a business is trusted, and local links are how it decides whether a business belongs to a place. A Lowell business earns local authority the same way it earns a reputation: by being visible in the life of the city.

The strongest local links are the unglamorous ones. A listing with the Greater Lowell Chamber of Commerce, a mention on a neighborhood association page, a sponsorship of a youth team at LeLacheur Park, a feature in a local paper about a mill-building renovation your crew worked on. None of these is a shortcut, and that is exactly why they count. Google has learned to tell the difference between a link a business earned and a link it bought.

Beyond the local layer, we pursue links from publishers and industry sites that raise the authority of the whole domain — articles written about the company, guest posts that demonstrate real expertise, citations that reinforce the business as a source worth referencing. The right SEO company for a Lowell business treats those links as part of one system with the local ones, not as a separate purchase. With access to more than 50,000 publisher websites, we can place that kind of link deliberately, but the local links are what tie it all to Lowell. A campaign that has both is hard to beat.

Content That Answers What Lowell Customers Actually Ask

Ask any Lowell business owner what customers ask before they buy, and you will hear the same questions over and over. How much does it cost. How long will it take. Do you serve my neighborhood. Are you licensed and insured. What happens if I am not happy. Those questions are the content plan — not a list of keywords a tool suggested, but the real doubts standing between a searcher and a phone call.

Blog posts are where most of those questions get answered. A post about what a roof replacement costs in a Lowell triple-decker, a post about how long a kitchen remodel takes in a mill building with old plumbing, a post about what to do when a basement floods in Pawtucketville — each one earns its way onto a search that a service page could never justify. An SEO consultant can hand a client that list of questions and say, here is your next six months of content, because the customers already wrote it in the questions they ask. That is why blogs are core to the way we build content: they are the pages that catch the long, specific searches from people who are close to deciding.

The discipline is to write for the customer, not for the keyword. A post that genuinely answers a question will rank for the keyword anyway, and it will convert the reader who lands on it. A post written to stuff a phrase into every paragraph will do neither. We write the first kind, and we write it about Lowell — its buildings, its neighborhoods, its seasons — because that is what makes it useful to the person reading it. The Lowell winter is a good example: frozen pipes, ice dams, heating failures, and the searches that spike with the first cold snap are predictable, and a business with posts ready for them is the business that gets those calls.

The discipline is to write for the customer, not for the keyword. A post that genuinely answers a question will rank for the keyword anyway, and it will convert the reader who lands on it. A post written to stuff a phrase into every paragraph will do neither. We write the first kind, and we write it about Lowell — its buildings, its neighborhoods, its seasons — because that is what makes it useful to the person reading it.

Serving Lowell and the Merrimack Valley

Our work in Lowell covers the whole city — Downtown Lowell, the Acre, Belvidere, Pawtucketville, Centralville, the Highlands, and South Lowell — and the Merrimack Valley towns around it: Chelmsford, Dracut, Tewksbury, Billerica, Westford, Andover, Lawrence, Haverhill, and Nashua. Our SEO experts cover each of those places with pages that describe real work there, instead of a list of town names pasted onto a generic page. Each of those places has its own mix of businesses and customers, and the pages we build reflect that instead of pretending the valley is one market.

If you are outside that list, the same approach still applies. We work with businesses in all 50 states, and the Lowell playbook — research the keywords, build the pages, earn the links, measure and repeat — works anywhere there are customers searching. The city changes; the method does not.

You can reach us by email at info@revenueboomers.com. Our hours are Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm. The fastest way to start is the free consultation — book a call and we will look at your site together.

Ready to Get Found Across Lowell

Someone in Lowell is looking for exactly what you do right now — a dentist, a lawyer, a roofer, a restaurant, a contractor — and they will call the business Google puts in front of them. The only question is whether that business is yours.

The free audit is the simplest way to find out. It takes one call, it costs nothing, and it tells you where you stand and what it would take to climb. Book a call with our team and we will walk through your site together, show you who is winning your customers, and give you a clear first step — whether you hire us or not.

Frequently Asked Questions About SEO in Lowell, Massachusetts

How long does it take for a Lowell business to move up on Google?

Most Lowell businesses we work with see their first movement within a few months — a service page climbing onto the first page, more views on the map listing, a few extra calls from searches they nearly ranked for already. The searches that pay the best take longer, because every established competitor in the Merrimack Valley is defending them. The curve is the same for everyone: steady work compounds, and the businesses that stay with it past the first 90 days are the ones that see the real change.

What does an SEO campaign cost a Lowell business month to month?

It depends on how many services you offer, how crowded your trade is, and how far your site has to travel. A single-location business with a focused set of services costs less to move than a company competing across the whole valley. The honest way to judge the spend is against what a new customer is worth to you — if a handful of extra jobs a month covers the campaign, the budget is working. We talk through the numbers on the free call before anyone commits to anything.

Do I need to rebuild my website before starting SEO in Lowell?

Usually not. Most Lowell sites we see are worth keeping — they need structure, speed fixes, and better content, not a fresh start. The audit tells us which it is. If the site is slow on phones, hard for Google to crawl, or built on a platform that fights every change, we will say so plainly and explain what the fix would take. But a rebuild is a last resort, not a sales opener.

How do Lowell customers actually find a business like mine?

Mostly on their phones, mostly through the map results and the first page of organic results. They search for the service plus Lowell, or for the nearest option, then they scan reviews, hours, and photos before they call. Some come through a blog post that answered a specific question, and some arrive through an AI answer that quoted a business with clear content. The campaign is built to be present at each of those moments, not just one of them.

Can you help my Lowell business show up in the map results?

Yes — the map results are where most local calls come from, so they are a central part of the work. We tune the Google Business Profile, keep the business information consistent across directories, build local citations, and set up a steady flow of reviews. The map pack rewards businesses that look active, accurate, and trusted, and those are things a campaign can genuinely improve.

Why do Lowell business owners pick Revenue Boomers over other agencies?

We show the work. You see the keyword research, the pages we wrote, the links we earned, and the ranking movement that followed — in plain language, on a regular schedule. There are no mystery reports and no long contracts after the first 90 days. Lowell business owners stay with us because the calls keep coming and the reporting makes sense, not because a contract says they have to.

Will my Lowell business keep its website and content if I leave?

Yes. The pages, the content, and the site itself are yours. That is worth asking about before you sign with anyone, because some agencies hold the work hostage when a client leaves. We build on your site and your accounts, so if you ever decide to stop, everything we created stays with you.

Does my Lowell business need blog posts, or are service pages enough?

Service pages cover the searches that name your service directly. Blog posts catch everything else — the questions customers ask before they are ready to call, the cost and timing questions, the neighborhood-specific problems like a flooded basement in Pawtucketville or a remodel in a mill building. Those long, specific searches add up to real traffic, and they are how a business earns trust before the first conversation. Blogs are a core part of the content we build.

What numbers should I watch to judge whether my Lowell campaign is working?

We track what matters: calls, form fills, and booked jobs, not just rankings. The monthly review shows which searches sent calls, which pages did the work, and what changed since last month. You can also check it yourself — your own call log is the most honest report there is. If the phones are not ringing more, the campaign is not working, whatever the rankings say.

What happens if a competitor in Lowell is already ahead of me?

Then we study them. The audit shows exactly which searches they win, which pages earn them, and where their links come from. A competitor ahead of you has usually been working at it longer, not better — and their weak spots are often visible once you look: thin pages, stale reviews, towns they never bothered to cover. We build the campaign around those gaps, starting with the searches you can win soonest.

Is SEO worth it for a small Lowell business with a tight budget?

For most small Lowell businesses, yes — because local search is where their customers already are, and the alternative is paying for every click forever. The key is to start narrow: the services that pay best, the neighborhoods closest to you, the searches with the clearest intent. A focused campaign on a tight budget beats a scattered one on a big budget, and the free consultation will tell you honestly whether the math works for your business.

How do I get started with a free SEO consultation for my Lowell business?

Book a call through the calendar link on this page, or fill out the form and we will reach out. Come with the basics — what you sell, who your best customers are, and which parts of Lowell and the Merrimack Valley you want more work from. We will look at your site together on the call and send you away with a short list of what to fix first, whether you hire us or not.