Advice
How to get found on Google locally
The highest-return thing you can do is free, takes an afternoon, and is not your website. Here is the order to do everything in, and what to ignore.
Local search is one of the few areas of marketing where a small business can genuinely beat a big one. You are competing against other firms within a few miles, not against the whole internet, and the things that decide it are mostly free and mostly within your control.
Here is what actually moves the needle, roughly in order of return.
1. Google Business Profile, before anything else
If you do one thing, do this. For most local businesses the map results, the little block of three businesses with stars above the ordinary results, generate more phone calls than the website does. The profile is free.
Claim it, then fill it in completely:
- The right primary category. Be specific: “roofing contractor”, not “contractor”.
- Accurate hours, including bank holidays.
- Real photographs of your work, your premises, your vehicles. Add some regularly.
- Your services listed individually.
- A link to the relevant page of your site, not always the homepage.
If you travel to customers rather than having a shop they visit, set it up as a service-area business and hide the address. You can specify the towns and postcodes you cover instead. That is the correct configuration for tradespeople and anyone working from home, and it is what Google expects.
2. Reviews, asked for properly
Reviews influence both where you appear and whether anyone rings. Most businesses have far fewer than they have earned, for one reason: they never ask.
Ask at the moment the customer is happiest, as you finish, in person. Send the direct link by text while you are still there. Do not offer anything in exchange, do not write them yourself, and do not buy them; all three are against Google’s rules and all three are detectable.
Reply to every review, including the bad ones. A calm, non-defensive reply to a poor review reassures the next reader far more than the absence of any poor reviews would.
3. Say where you work, on the website
Google needs to associate your business with places. It cannot do that if the only geography on your site is “North Yorkshire”.
Name the towns and villages you cover, on a real page, in ordinary sentences. If a particular town is worth serious effort, give it its own page, but only if you can genuinely write something specific about working there. A page that is your standard copy with the place name swapped in is spotted by readers and by Google, and it does more harm than good.
4. A page per service
You cannot rank for eight different things with one page called “Services”. Each service that people search for separately needs a page that answers that search properly.
This does more for most small business sites than any amount of technical tuning.
5. Consistent details, everywhere
Your business name, address and phone number should be identical wherever they appear: your site, Google, Facebook, directories, trade bodies. An old phone number on a listing you forgot about creates doubt about which is right.
Spend an hour searching your own business name and fixing what is wrong. It is dull and it works.
6. Speed, on a phone, on mobile data
Not on your laptop on the office wifi. Turn wifi off and load your site on your phone. If it takes more than about three seconds, you are losing people who never appear in any statistic you look at.
Nine times out of ten the culprit is images uploaded at full size straight off a camera.
Nobody can promise you first place
Results differ by person, location and device, and Google changes them constantly. Anyone guaranteeing you a position is either inexperienced or hoping you will not check. What can be promised is the work: the profile, the reviews, the pages, the speed, the consistency. Do those and you will compete properly.
What to ignore
- Cold emails promising page one. Delete them.
- Directory submission packages. A hundred low-quality listings does nothing except create a hundred places for your phone number to go out of date.
- Keyword stuffing. Writing “plumber in Malton” nine times reads badly to a customer and has not worked on Google for well over a decade.
- Anything sold as a secret. There are no secrets. There is a list of unglamorous things and whether you have done them.
A realistic order of work
- This week: claim and complete the Google Business Profile.
- This month: ask your last ten happy customers for a review.
- This quarter: split the services page, write a real areas page, fix the image sizes.
- Ongoing: keep asking for reviews, keep the profile current.
None of that requires hiring anybody. If you do it and still need more, that is the point at which paying for ongoing SEO starts to make sense, not before.
