Our goal is to cut through the noise and make it easier and faster for you to find good local businesses.

We've all encountered that "eyes glaze over" experience when our internet search produced a list of tens or hundreds of companies. Trying to make sense of these lists can take a lot of time as you sort through conflicting or superficial information about the many companies listed.

We want to make the process faster. To do that, we take a shortlist approach. We do research ahead of time to identify companies that we think are committed to providing good customer service. We list only a few local businesses in each category and geographic area. And we obtain detailed information about each listed business so you can quickly get a detailed, one page description of the business and determine whether or not you want to contact them. Put all of this together and we hope it adds up to a faster search and decision process.

The companies on our shortlist meet our selection criteria and agree to be constantly monitored for customer satisfaction.

When we look for good local businesses, we look for those who we think have a history and willingness to provide great customer service. These businesses come in all sizes, but we hope to bring to you those local businesses that are big enough to handle your project but small enough that you know who you're dealing with. Where possible, we also look for companies whose owners are active in the community and who provide eco-friendly services.

When the companies agree to be listed with LocalTop, they agree that we can conduct follow up surveys of everyone we refer to them. We use the survey results to determine whether or not a local business should remain on our list.

In turn, we offer our local businesses a fair deal. Members of our service provider network pay us an industry standard referral fee only if they get business from a customer we send their way. We think that's the way to facilitate a good, no pressure discussion between you, the customer, and local businesses.

We are currently connecting consumers with local businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area.

You can browse a list of the service categories currently supported in your city, right here. Our plan is to continuously grow the range of service categories and service regions we cover on our web site, with the goal of helping customers find the best service providers, in categories as diverse as plumbers, dog trainers, chiropractors, caterers and accountants.

We hope you get good results using LocalTop.com. If you have any comments, we'd love to hear from you. Our feedback form is here.