A hairdresser has excellent reviews and half the town goes to her. But when somebody types “hairdresser” into their phone, the map shows three salons nobody has ever mentioned. Hers isn’t among them. She isn’t worse than they are. She simply never told Google she exists.
Of all the kinds of optimisation, local SEO is the least impressive to present and the most rewarding for the business. None of it looks clever on a slide. And plenty of trades live off it.
How local search is different
In ordinary search, Google competes with the whole world. In local search it competes with whoever is nearby. When somebody searches for “bakery near me” or “boiler engineer” plus a town, two things happen at once: a map appears with three businesses on it (the “local pack”), and the usual results sit underneath.
That pack is gold. Most phone clicks land on it, because it comes first and because next to the name there is a button to call and one to navigate. Who gets into it depends mainly on three things: how close you are to the searcher, how complete and active your profile is, and what other people say about you. You cannot change the distance. You can change the other two.
Google Business Profile: the most effect for the least money
If you do only one thing in local SEO, make it this. A Google Business Profile is free and it is what Google shows before it ever gets to your website. A surprising number of businesses have it half filled in, or have never claimed it — the profile exists, Google’s algorithm created it, and nobody manages it.
What is worth completing properly:
- The category. The most important field on the whole profile and the most often got wrong. “Construction company” and “Rendering contractor” are not the same and don’t bring in the same searches. Pick the primary category that most precisely describes what you actually do, and only then add secondary ones.
- Opening hours, including holidays. Sounds trivial until a customer arrives at a locked door. Google notices, because people flag that the information is wrong.
- Services and description. Write them in the words customers use, not internal terminology. Nobody searches for “comprehensive sanitary engineering solutions”.
- Photographs — yours. Not from a stock library. The workshop, the team, completed work, the entrance to the building so people can find you. A photograph of the entrance is more useful than it sounds.
- A phone number somebody answers. That is the only one that counts.
Reviews: an uncomfortable subject worth taking seriously
Reviews work in two directions. They influence who Google shows, and whether a person who can already see you clicks on you or on the next one.
The most boring approach works best: simply ask the customer once the work is done. Not once a year, but every time. Most people will write a review if somebody asks nicely and sends them a link. There is no shortcut here — bought reviews are recognisable these days, Google removes them, and you risk a profile you spent years building.
Reply to reviews. Including the bad ones, especially the bad ones. Calmly, specifically, without bearing a grudge. A prospective customer reads exactly that reply and forms a view from it about how you would respond if something went wrong for them. One well-explained bad review does less damage than twenty five-star ratings and no response at all.
Making sure your details don’t contradict each other
Your name, address and phone number are probably written in ten places: on the website, in the business profile, in directories, on Facebook, on an old profile you forgot about. If those entries differ — a different house number, an old phone number, two versions of the company name — Google doesn’t know which to believe and becomes cautious.
This isn’t rocket science, it is tidying up. Once, make a list of every place you are listed, make the details consistent and remove duplicate profiles. An afternoon’s work with a lasting effect.
What should be on the website
The place you operate in should be written where both a person and a search engine expect it: in the text, in the footer, on the contact page, alongside a map. If you cover several towns, a genuine page for each larger one makes sense — but only if it says something. Ten identical pages with only the town name swapped is a cheap trick Google recognised a decade ago.
Content a local customer actually looks for helps too: roughly what the most common job costs, how quickly you can come, what you need from the customer, which area you cover. Those are the questions people really type.
One honest limitation
Local SEO is the most language-bound work there is. Reviews, replies to reviews, directory listings and local landing pages all have to be written in the language of the place. Technical work — profile structure, consistency of details, structured data, site speed — is language-neutral and can be done anywhere.
So if you are operating in a market whose language your supplier doesn’t write, ask directly who will write the replies to reviews. If the answer is a translation tool, that will show. We do this work for English-language markets, or alongside whoever writes your language while we take the technical half.
What not to spend money on
A few things get sold often and deliver little. Listings in a hundred random directories no living soul visits. Review packages. Promises that you will be “first on Google” — nobody can guarantee that, because the result isn’t the same for two people standing in different parts of the same town. And adding town names into the business name on the profile, which is explicitly against the rules and can cost you the profile.
How you know whether it is working
The advantage of local SEO is that the numbers are unusually tangible. In the business profile you can see how many people called, how many asked for directions and which searches they found you through. Those aren’t vague “impressions”, those are people who tried to reach you.
Track three things: calls from the profile, direction requests, and new enquiries from the website. If those three are moving, the work is working. If they aren’t, the conversation needs to be about the content rather than about the algorithm.
How we approach visibility is described on the SEO and visibility page, and the prices are openly listed in the optimisation price list. If what interests you is where you stand today and what the first thing to fix is, look at a website audit, or simply write through the contact form or call +386 40 529 425.