Local SEO for small business, in the order I actually do it

What local SEO is competing for

When someone searches for a service near them, Google shows a map with a short list of businesses above the normal blue links. That short list is where most local calls come from, and it is chosen on three things: how relevant your business looks for the search, how close you are to the person searching, and how established your business looks compared to the others nearby.

You cannot move your building, so distance is mostly fixed. Relevance and prominence are not fixed — they are the product of what you have published, what your profile says, and what other people have said about you. That is the whole game.

• Relevance: does your profile and site clearly say you do this exact service, in this exact area?
• Distance: how far the searcher is from you. Largely out of your hands.
• Prominence: reviews, mentions, and a site that looks like a real operating business.

Step 1 — Fix the profile before you touch the website

Your Google Business Profile is the highest-leverage thing you own, and it is usually the thing nobody has opened since it was created. Before writing a single page of website copy, I go through the profile line by line: primary category, secondary categories, services with real descriptions, service area, hours including holiday hours, phone, and the website link.

The primary category is the single field with the most influence on which searches you can appear for at all. Pick the one that names what you do, not the one that sounds most impressive. Everything else you offer goes in as a secondary category or a service.

Act as a local search specialist. My business is {what you do} in {city, state}. Here is my current Google Business Profile primary category: {category}. Secondary categories: {list}. Services listed: {list}. Ask me any question you need, then give me: 1) the primary category you would set and why, 2) up to five secondary categories worth adding, 3) a list of services I am missing that customers in my area actually search for, each with a two-sentence description in plain language. Do not invent services I have not said I offer.

Step 2 — One page per service, one page per real area

A single page that lists nine services ranks for none of them properly. Give each service its own page, written for someone who is deciding, not browsing: what the problem looks like, what you actually do, what it costs or how pricing works, and how to start.

Area pages are the part people abuse. If you genuinely work in a town — you have done jobs there, you can name the work — write a page for it. If you have never worked there, do not publish a page claiming you serve it. Thin, duplicated town pages are the most common reason a small local site stops being trusted.

• Service page: the problem, the process, the price or pricing model, the next step.
• Area page: only for areas you actually serve, with something specific to that area on the page.
• Every page has one clear H1 and one clear action.
• Link services to each other where a customer would genuinely need both.

Step 3 — Make reviews a routine, not a campaign

Review count and recency both matter, and a burst of ten reviews in one week followed by silence for a year reads exactly like what it is. The fix is a routine: a request goes out at the same point in every job, using the same short message, with a direct link to the review form.

Answering reviews matters as much as collecting them. Every reply is a place your service and your city appear in text that Google reads, and it is the only public evidence of how you handle a complaint.

Write a reply to this review for my business. Business: {what you do} in {city}. Review: {paste the full review, including the star rating}. Rules: under 60 words, first person, name the specific thing they mentioned, no marketing language, no promises about future pricing. If the review is negative, acknowledge the specific failure, say what I am doing about it, and invite them to contact me directly — do not argue and do not offer compensation unless I tell you to.

Step 4 — Get the basics consistent everywhere else

Citations are just your name, address and phone number appearing consistently on other sites. They are not a growth lever on their own, but inconsistency is a drag — three phone numbers across four directories makes you look like a business that closed and reopened.

Pick the exact format of your business name, address and phone, write it down once, and use that string everywhere. Fix the big directories and the industry-specific ones for your trade; ignore the sellers who want to submit you to five hundred sites.

Step 5 — Measure the two things that mean anything

Rankings move around by device and by street corner, so chasing a position number will drive you mad. I watch two things instead: calls and direction requests from the profile, and which search terms Google says triggered your listing. Both are in the profile's own performance panel, free.

On the website side, Search Console tells you which queries showed your pages and which pages get clicked. If a service page gets impressions and no clicks, the page ranks and the title is failing. If it gets neither, the page has nothing on it worth ranking.

• Profile: calls, direction requests, website clicks, and the searches that surfaced you.
• Search Console: impressions and clicks per page and per query.
• One number that matters more than both: how many enquiries turned into work.