Bring businesses in, get their services found, and answer “who do we have for that?” quickly. Includes a page you can hand straight to the businesses you invite.
Three fields, one of them required. Hosting invitations requires a Community Host subscription.
Choose Invite a business by email.
The only mandatory field, and it becomes their login. Use an address a real person reads — an owner or manager rather than info@ where you can. An invitation landing in an unmonitored inbox is the most common reason a business never appears.
The website names the profile from the domain, so the business arrives recognisable instead of blank. Without it they land on an empty profile and must build from nothing, which is where most invitations stall.
This is what they actually read. Name yourself, name the community, say why this business. “I run the Ypsilanti community and we get asked for gutter work constantly — I’d like you in it” converts. A blank invitation from an unfamiliar brand does not.
They receive an email with their account details and a link that signs them straight in. Assume it may be missed — tell them in person or by text that it’s coming.
Invited businesses have an account but never chose to sign up, so they receive the invitation rather than the standard welcome sequence. Until they write a description they are close to unfindable — which is why the handout below matters more than the invitation itself.
Paste this into an email body — not an attachment, which from an unfamiliar sender tends to go unopened.
You have a profile in our community. Four things decide whether you get found. Do them in this order.
This matters more than anything else on the page, because it is the one field every search reads — including our AI assistant, which answers visitors asking “who can fix my gutters?”
Name each service plainly, in the words a customer would use. If you do gutter repair, the phrase “gutter repair” needs to appear. If you serve particular towns, name them. Write for a neighbour asking what you do, not for a brochure.
Comma-separated, lowercase, one concept each — the services you want to be called about, plus your town and ZIP:
gutter repair, gutter cleaning, downspout, siding, storm damage, ypsilanti, 48197
Skip your business name (already searched), plurals (handled automatically), and words like “quality” or “professional” — nobody searches for those.
Our AI assistant reads FAQ answers when recommending businesses, so this is free visibility. Answer the three questions you’re actually asked most — pricing ranges, service area, how fast you can come out.
This is how “near me” and ZIP searches find you. An incomplete address means you’re missing from every location-based result.
Then check your own work. Search our community for the service you most want to be hired for. If you don’t come up, your description is missing the words a customer would use — almost always the cause, and a five-minute fix.
Four tools with different strengths. Knowing which to reach for saves the most time.
Best for “who do we have for…” questions in plain language. It asks for a location, then returns businesses with their community and a link to each profile. Because it needs every word to match, keep it short: gutter repair Ypsilanti beats a full sentence.
Best for browsing who is in a community. It matches business name and description only — a good directory and a poor service search. If a trade search finds nothing here, that’s expected rather than missing data.
Best for finding communities rather than businesses — by name, type, or the events inside them. Use it to see which neighbouring communities exist and where a business you know already belongs.
The broadest and the one to trust for service lookups: it reads keywords, descriptions, industry, address and ZIP, understands word endings, and is the only one that sorts by proximity when you include a location.
You can keep a private note on any person or business profile, visible only to you, and search it from your own People list — so “met at chamber breakfast, quilting” makes someone findable later by something only you would remember. Another user searching those words gets nothing back.
Every keyword decision follows from one fact — the four places people search read different fields. Text in the wrong field is invisible to whichever tool someone happens to use.
Below, “yes” means this field can make a business turn up on that surface.
| Field a business fills in | Search page | Business listing | Communities | Anser chat |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Business name | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| Description | yes | yes | no | yes |
| Keywords | yes | no | no | no |
| Notes / details | yes | no | yes | yes |
| Services offered | no | no | no | yes |
| Address / ZIP | yes | no | no | no |
| City & state | yes | no | no | yes |
| Industry | yes | no | no | no |
| FAQ answers | no | no | no | yes |
| Community name | no | no | yes | yes |
One nuance on Keywords and Anser: keywords don’t bring a business into Anser’s results, but once a business is there on the strength of its description, Anser can see its keywords and mention them. So keywords enrich the answer without ever earning a place in it.
Only one field decides findability on every surface: the Description. Keywords make a business findable on the search page only — not on the business listing, and not in Anser.
So the instruction that matters most for every business you invite: the words a customer would say must appear in the Description — not only in Keywords. A business with rich keywords and a thin description gets found by some visitors and missed by others, with no pattern they can see.
Keywords are comma-separated, roughly 255 characters. Consistency across your community is what turns them from decoration into a working index.
Ask for comma-separated, lowercase, singular terms — customer words first, trade words second:
gutter repair, gutter cleaning, downspout, roof, siding, storm damage, ypsilanti, 48197
Give invited businesses the categories you want covered, so two members offering the same service describe it the same way. Adapt to your community:
roofing, gutters, siding, windows, doors, decks, fencing, masonry, pressure washing, storm damage
plumbing, electrical, hvac, painting, flooring, tile, drywall, kitchen remodel, bath remodel, handyman
landscaping, lawn care, tree service, snow removal, irrigation, pest control, pool service
auto repair, oil change, tires, body shop, detailing, towing, mobile mechanic
tutoring, math tutor, reading tutor, homework help, test prep, sat prep, act prep, college essays, study skills, special education, dyslexia, esl, language lessons, music lessons, coding classes, summer program, in home tutoring, online tutoring
accounting, tax prep, bookkeeping, insurance, real estate, mortgage, legal, notary, financial planning
restaurant, catering, bakery, coffee, florist, gifts, boutique, grocery
salon, barber, spa, nails, massage, fitness, personal training, dental, chiropractic
photography, videography, dj, event planning, printing, signage, web design, marketing
The Keywords field sits on the business profile form, in the links and social section. It is not on the “Edit My Business” screen — so “go add keywords” sends people where the field doesn’t appear, and most give up rather than hunt.
The address is /bussignup/{profile id}, where the profile id is the number in the business’s own profile URL. A business at /events/30054 edits keywords at /bussignup/30054. Put that link directly in your message.
A concierge community degrades quietly. These checks catch it.
Once a quarter, search your community for the five services you most expect to be asked for. Any that return nothing is either a gap in your roster or a business with a thin description. Both are fixable; neither announces itself.
Browse your business listing for profiles with no description. Those businesses are effectively absent from search however good they are. One personal nudge with the handout usually fixes it.
When two members offer the same service under different words — “lawn care” and “landscaping”, “handyman” and “home repair” — visitors find one and miss the other. Shared vocabulary from the starter list prevents it.
Community names are searchable in both Anser and the communities list, so a recognisable name earns traffic on its own. A name people say out loud — a neighbourhood, a chamber, an association — gets found. “Community 3” does not.
If a business follows the handout and still can’t find itself, the description is the first thing to check — it’s the only field every search reads.