Local SEO for a small business, without the jargon

Local SEO has an unusually large amount of nonsense written about it, mostly because it is sold as a mysterious service. The underlying model is public and simple.

Google has said local results are ranked on three things: relevance, distance and prominence. Almost everything worth doing maps onto one of them, and one of them you cannot change at all.

Distance, which you cannot fix

How far you are from the person searching.

This is why you rank well near your premises and poorly across town, and why a competitor with a worse website beats you for searches near them. It is not a failure of your marketing.

Two honest consequences. If you have a physical location, where it is genuinely matters. And if you travel to customers, set your service area accurately rather than covering half the country, because an inflated area does not extend your reach, it dilutes your relevance.

Ignore anyone selling a way around this. There is not one, and the ways people attempt it, fake addresses, virtual offices, listings at a friend's house, are guideline breaches that get listings suspended.

Relevance, which you control directly

How well you match what was searched for. This is the cheapest win available.

The primary category on your Business Profile is the largest single factor. Be as specific as your business allows.

The services list on the profile, which most businesses leave empty, and which is where Google learns what you do in your own words.

Pages on your site about what you actually do, in the words customers use rather than trade terms. If customers search "fuse box replacement" and you only ever write "consumer unit upgrade", you are invisible to half of them.

The words on the page matching the search. Unglamorous, still true.

The profile checklist is the practical version of this section.

Prominence, which takes longer

How well known and well regarded you are. Two components in practice.

Reviews. Volume relative to your competitors, recency, and whether they say anything specific. This is the biggest lever most small businesses have never pulled, and it is a systems problem.

Being named elsewhere, consistently. Directories, trade bodies, suppliers, local organisations. What matters is not the quantity of listings but that they all agree: same name, same address format, same phone number.

Where they disagree, and they usually do because businesses move and change numbers, Google has to work out whether these are one business or several. Cleaning that up is tedious, free, and one of the more reliable improvements available.

The three things to do this month

If you do nothing else:

1. Finish the Business Profile. Every category, every service, every attribute, hours including holidays, twenty photographs. One afternoon.

2. Set up a way to ask every customer for a review. Not a resolution, a mechanism attached to something that already happens, such as the invoice.

3. Make your details identical everywhere. Write the correct version down once, then go and fix every place that disagrees.

None of those cost money. Together they beat almost any paid local SEO package sold to a small business.

On location pages

The standard advice is a page per town you serve. It works only under one condition: each page has to say something genuinely different about that place.

If a page would read identically with the town name swapped out, it should not exist. Google treats near-duplicate location pages as doorway pages and can discount the lot, and readers spot it even faster.

A page about a town is worth having when you can write about the actual work there: the housing stock, the common problems, jobs you have done, the areas you cover and the ones you do not. If you cannot, one page covering your area honestly is better than eight thin ones.

What to be sceptical about

Guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls Google's results. A guarantee is either meaningless or about a term nobody searches for.

Citation building packages. Hundreds of listings on directories no human visits. What matters is consistency across the handful that are relevant to you, not volume.

Monthly reports with no actions. Traffic charts are evidence of activity, not activity. Ask what was changed and why.

Anything requiring an address you do not occupy. It is a suspension waiting to happen, and a suspended listing is far worse than a mediocre one.

The honest summary

Local search rewards being genuinely findable and genuinely well regarded near where you are. The tactics are mostly admin: fill in the fields, keep the details the same, ask for reviews, write about what you actually do.

It is not complicated. It is just nobody's job, which is why so few businesses have done it and why the ones that have are usually near the top.