Local SEO
Local SEO for service businesses, explained properly
What Google is actually deciding when it picks three businesses to show, which work moves that decision, and how long it honestly takes.
THE SHORT ANSWER
Local SEO for a service business is the work of being one of the few local results shown when somebody nearby searches for what you do. Four things move it: a complete and correctly categorised Google Business Profile, a page for each service you sell, a page for each area you genuinely work in, and consistent name, address, and phone details everywhere they appear. It takes months, not weeks, and nobody can guarantee a position.
What Google is actually choosing between
When somebody searches for a service near them, Google produces two things: a map with a small number of businesses on it, and a list of ordinary web results underneath. The map block is where most local service enquiries come from, and it is a different competition from the one below it. Getting into the map block is largely about your business profile and your proximity to the searcher. Ranking below it is largely about your pages. Most businesses work on one and wonder why the other did not move.
- Relevance. Does this business obviously do the thing that was searched? This is what categories, services, and service pages answer.
- Distance. How close is the business to the person searching, or to the area they named? You cannot change this, which is why area pages matter and why a business twenty miles away rarely appears.
- Prominence. How well known and well regarded does this business look? Reviews, consistency of information, and being mentioned in the ordinary places a real business is mentioned.
The four things that actually move it
There is a long tail of local SEO advice and most of it is noise. In practice, for a service business, four things do nearly all of the work.
- A complete Google Business Profile, correctly categorised. The primary category is the single most consequential field on it, and a surprising number of businesses have the wrong one. Fill in the services, the hours including how after-hours calls are handled, and the service area. Put up photographs of your own work rather than stock images.
- One page per service you sell. A single page listing nine services ranks for none of them well. Nine pages, each about one thing, is the version that works. It is more writing and there is no way around that.
- One page per area you genuinely work in. Emphasis on genuinely. A real page about a place you actually serve, with detail only somebody who works there would write, is worth having. A page produced by swapping a city name into a template is a doorway page: it does not rank, and at scale it can hurt the pages that would have.
- Consistent name, address, and phone details, everywhere. This is the least interesting item on the list and the most commonly skipped. If your business appears with three different phone numbers across directories, you are asking Google to work out which one is you.
Reviews, and the thing people get wrong about them
Reviews matter, and the part that matters most is not the star average. It is recency and volume relative to your competitors, plus the fact that a real human is going to read two or three of them in the ten seconds before deciding to call you.
- A steady trickle of recent reviews beats a burst of thirty two years ago.
- Ask after every completed job, as a matter of routine rather than when you remember. This is the single most common gap we see.
- Reply to reviews, including the bad ones, because the reply is read by the next prospect rather than by the person who wrote it.
- Do not buy reviews or incentivise them. Beyond the obvious risk, it is very visible to anybody reading them, and readable reviews are the point.
How long it takes, honestly
Local ranking moves in months. Some profile fixes show up within a couple of weeks, because completing a profile that was half empty is a fast change. Anything involving new pages earning trust takes longer, typically three to six months before the shape of it is clear, and longer in a competitive city.
That is worth being blunt about for a practical reason: it means the work has to be started before the season it is meant to serve. A roofer who begins in the week of the storm and an HVAC business that begins during the heat wave are both about four months late. Neither is being badly served by SEO; they started it at the only moment it could not help them.
Work that commonly does nothing
Some of the most commonly sold local SEO work has very little effect for a service business. It is worth recognising it so you can spend the money elsewhere.
- Mass directory submissions. A handful of major, real directories are worth being listed in consistently. Being submitted to four hundred is not, and the listings are frequently wrong, which actively works against the consistency point above.
- Blogging on topics with no commercial relationship to what you sell. A plumber writing about the history of copper is producing content, not demand.
- Adding more cities to your service area than you actually serve. It widens nothing and dilutes the areas where you might genuinely have ranked.
- Keyword stuffing your business name. Putting your service and city into your profile name is against the rules, is easy to report, and puts the whole profile at risk.
Where local SEO stops and something else starts
Ranking is one stage of a longer chain, and it is worth knowing what it does not do. It brings somebody to your site. It does not make the page ask for the job, it does not answer the phone when they call, and it does not follow up when they do not book immediately.
That matters because the most common disappointing outcome from local SEO work is not "we did not rank". It is "we ranked, the phone rang more, and we are not obviously busier", which is a capture and response problem wearing an SEO costume. If the calls you already get are going to voicemail, fixing that will change your numbers faster than any ranking work.
Common questions
How long does local SEO take to work?
Profile completeness fixes can show up within a couple of weeks. Anything involving new service or area pages earning trust typically takes three to six months before the shape is clear, and longer in a competitive city. Anyone offering you a specific position by a specific date is guessing.
Do I need a page for every city I serve?
You need a real page for every area you genuinely work in, and no pages at all for areas you do not. A page produced by swapping a city name into an otherwise identical template is a doorway page: it does not rank, and building them at scale can damage the pages that would have.
Is the Google Business Profile more important than the website?
For the map block, usually yes. For the ordinary results underneath it, the website does the work. Since most local service enquiries come from the map block, a business with a mediocre site and an excellent profile often outperforms the reverse, which surprises people who have just paid for a website.
Can you guarantee a first-page ranking?
No, and neither can anybody else. Ranking depends on competitors you do not control, on the distance between you and each searcher, and on a system that changes. What can be committed to is the work: the pages, the profile, the consistency, and the reviews. We will not put a position in a contract.
What is the first thing to fix?
Almost always the Google Business Profile, because it is the fastest to change and the most commonly half finished. Check the primary category first: it is the highest-leverage single field and it is wrong more often than you would expect.
KEEP READING
Want to know where you actually stand?
The useful version of this is not a report full of scores. It is which of the four things above are missing for your business, and which of them is worth doing first.