Local SEO advice tends to come in the form of forty-seven-point checklists. Most of it doesn’t matter, or matters so marginally that the hours spent on it would be better spent anywhere else. These four things do matter.
One: your Google Business Profile is claimed, complete, and active
If you haven’t claimed your Google Business Profile, do that before you read the rest of this. It’s free, it takes twenty minutes, and it’s the single highest-leverage thing a local service business can do online.
“Complete” means: category set correctly, hours accurate (including holiday hours), photos added, services listed, description written. A lot of businesses claim their profile and stop there. The ones that rank well have done the whole thing.
“Active” means: new photos occasionally (once a month is enough), posts if you have something worth saying, responding to all reviews within a few days. Google appears to weight activity in its local rankings. More importantly, activity signals to potential customers that you’re still there.
Two: your business name and address are consistent everywhere they appear
This one sounds trivial. It isn’t. “123 High Street” and “123 High St” are different, as far as the algorithms are concerned. “The White Lion” and “White Lion” are different.
Go through every place your business appears: Google, Yelp, Facebook, your local chamber of commerce directory, any local news mentions, any directories you’ve been added to over the years. Make the name and address identical everywhere.
Three: you have more reviews than your nearest competitors
Review count is a ranking factor. So is review recency. A business with two hundred reviews and the most recent one from last year will lose ground to a business with eighty reviews where ten arrived this month.
The implication: getting reviews is not a one-time campaign. It’s a permanent part of how you operate. We’ve written about the mechanics of asking for reviews in more detail elsewhere.
Four: your website mentions your location in the right places
Your homepage should mention your city or region within the first three hundred words. Your “about” page should mention it. If you have a contact page, it should have your full address in text (not just an image of a map).
If you serve multiple areas, a page per area works. “Plumbing services in Exeter” — a page with genuinely useful content about the service as it relates to that area — ranks. A page that’s just a list of place names does not.
What probably doesn’t matter much
Schema markup, unless you have someone who knows what they’re doing. It doesn’t hurt, but it won’t move the needle for most small businesses.
Backlinks, for purely local rankings. They matter for organic search; they matter less for the local pack.
Social media following. There is no clear relationship between social following and local search rankings.
These four things, done well, will put you in the top results for most low-to-moderate-competition local searches. If you’re in a highly competitive market — multiple strong businesses all doing this well — you may need to go further. But start here.
Iwan consults with local service businesses on marketing strategy — mostly trades, clinics, and studios under twenty staff. He's been a Folio contributor since 2022.
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