Local SEO
Somebody types a trade and a town, sees three businesses on a map, and rings one of them. Getting into those three is a different job from ranking a web page — and most of it happens off your site.
Where the work happensGoogle is fairly open about how local results are ranked: how close you are, how well known you are, and how clearly you match what was searched. One of those you cannot change, which is worth knowing before you pay anyone.
The map results and the ordinary blue links underneath are ranked differently and respond to different work. Most of what moves the map sits in your Google profile and your reviews. Most of what moves the links below sits on your website.
The strongest factor in the map results is simply how close you are to the person searching. No amount of work puts you in the pack for a town thirty miles away where you have no presence.
Anyone selling you map rankings across a whole county is selling you something that does not exist.
How well known the business is: reviews, mentions elsewhere on the web, whether anyone links to you. This is the part that genuinely responds to effort, and it is mostly reviews.
Steady and real beats a burst of forty in one week, which looks exactly like what it is.
Whether your profile and your site say plainly that you do this specific thing, in this specific place. Categories, services, and a page that actually names the work.
The cheapest wins are here, and they are usually fields nobody has filled in.
Roughly in order of what moves first. The profile is free and usually half empty; the pages take longest and last longest.
Most profiles are a name, a phone number and nothing else. The empty fields are the cheapest ranking work available to a small business, and the one thing you can do this afternoon without paying anybody.
The primary category does most of the work, and picking a vague one is the most common mistake on a profile. Secondary categories cover the rest of what you do without diluting it.
Your own work, your van, your team, the finished job. Recent activity on a profile matters, and a gallery of stock images helps nobody decide to ring you.
Bank holidays, the week between Christmas and New Year, the Saturday you actually do work. “Hours not set” on a profile costs you the person searching at seven in the evening, which is when a lot of people search.
The best time to ask is the day after the job is finished and the customer is still pleased. Nobody remembers to do this reliably, which is exactly the sort of thing worth automating.
Including the bad ones, especially the bad ones. A calm reply to an unfair review persuades the next reader far better than the review damages you.
Buying reviews risks the profile you depend on. Asking only the happy customers is against the rules on most platforms and obvious to anyone reading.
Reviews mentioning the actual job and the actual town help you appear for that job in that town. You cannot script that, but asking a specific question — rather than “please leave me a review” — tends to produce it.
Your site, your profile, the directories, the old listing from the unit you left in 2019. When these disagree, search engines trust all of them less, and it is the most common silent problem I find.
Google, Bing and Apple cost nothing but an evening. After that, the trade bodies and local organizations your customers actually check.
Paid directories mostly sell a link on a page nobody visits. If a customer would never use it to find you, it is not doing anything for you either.
Moving premises, changing your number, a listing a supplier created for you years ago, a duplicate profile somebody set up by accident. Finding and closing the duplicates is often the single biggest fix on a local audit.
This is how you appear in the ordinary results for a town you are not physically in. It only works if the page is real: the jobs you have done there, how far it is, what you charge to travel, which suburbs you cover.
Forty pages identical but for the town name are a doorway, and search engines have been dealing with those for a very long time. Three honest pages beat forty spun ones.
LocalBusiness markup, the address in the footer, a phone number that dials when tapped. Quick, permanent, and usually missing.
A page for a town you have never worked in will not rank and should not. If you want work in a place you do not currently cover, the honest route is to do some work there first — even at cost — and then write about it.
How the work goes
Where you currently appear for the searches that matter, from the places that matter — results differ street by street, so checking from one postal code tells you very little. Plus every listing of you I can find, and which of them disagree with each other.
Every field completed, the right primary category, services listed properly, hours including the awkward ones, photographs of your own work. It costs nothing but time and it is usually the first thing that moves the map results.
A request that goes out automatically the morning after a job closes, chases once, and stops when they leave one. Then replies to every review that arrives. This is the part that keeps working after I have gone, provided it keeps running.
One page per place you genuinely work, written from the jobs you have actually done there. Slower than the rest and the part that keeps paying years later, because a page you own cannot be outbid.
Usually with the profile, because it is free, it moves fastest, and it tells you quickly whether the rest is worth paying for.
Where you appear from the places that matter, every listing of you online, and which of them contradict each other.
Filled in properly, duplicates closed, categories fixed. The cheapest work available and usually the first to move.
An automatic request after every job, so it keeps happening on the weeks nobody has time to remember.
One at a time, for the towns you actually work in, written from real jobs rather than copied with the name changed.
Quoted per scope after the audit. The profile work is often small enough that I will tell you to do it yourself.
Two of these have answers most agencies would rather not give you.
In the map results, largely no. Proximity to the person searching is the strongest factor and you cannot change where you are. In the ordinary results below the map you can rank anywhere, which is why a real page about the work you do in that town is worth having and a thin copy of your homepage is not.
Profile work and review requests can move things within weeks, because the map results respond faster than ordinary search. Ranking a page for a town takes months. Anything faster than that is usually somebody rearranging a report.
No. If you travel to customers you register as a service-area business, hide the address and list the areas you cover. Trying to look like you have premises you do not is the thing most likely to get a profile suspended.
More than the businesses currently above you, arriving steadily rather than forty in one week. Recency counts, so a business with sixty reviews and none this year often sits below one with twenty and three last month.
Almost never. The free listings that matter — Google, Bing, Apple — cost nothing but time, and paid directories mostly sell you a link on a page nobody visits. The exception is a trade body your customers actually check.
You can report them, and it sometimes works. What you cannot do is compete by buying your own, because the accounts that sell them get purged in batches and take the businesses with them. The durable answer is asking every real customer, every time.
Start here
Not overall — from the streets your customers search from. That is the number that decides whether the phone rings, and most businesses have never checked it.