Tag: Local SEO

Local SEO has a reputation for being complicated, largely maintained by people who sell it monthly. Most of what matters is a short list, most of it is free, and most of it is a one time job with light maintenance.

Here it is in order of impact.

1. Your Google Business Profile, completed

This is the highest return item by a wide margin and it is the one most often left half finished.

For local searches, Google shows a map pack of businesses before showing ordinary website results. Appearing there matters more than your website’s ranking for most local queries, because a large share of people never scroll past it.

What to do, once, properly:

Claim and verify it. If you have not, this comes first.

Choose the right primary category. This is the single most influential field in the whole profile. Be specific. “Emergency plumber” and “plumber” are different categories and they surface in different searches. Add secondary categories for the other things you genuinely do.

Complete every field. Hours including holiday exceptions, phone, address or service area, website, description, services or products listed individually, attributes.

Upload real photos. Twenty of them, taken on your phone in decent light. Exterior with whatever a person would use to recognise you from the road, interior, work, people.

Set your service area accurately if you travel to customers rather than having them come to you.

This is an afternoon. It outperforms months of most other activity for a local business.

2. Reviews on Google specifically

BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2025 found Google to be by far the most used platform for finding reviews, cited by around 83 percent of consumers, well ahead of Yelp, Facebook and everything else. Their data also shows only around 4 percent of people saying they never read reviews at all.

Which means if you concentrate review effort anywhere, concentrate it on Google.

Ask at the moment somebody says they are happy. Send the short review link by text so it is one tap. Respond to every review, including the difficult ones, calmly and without arguing, because the reply is written for the next twenty readers rather than the reviewer.

Recency counts. A steady trickle of recent reviews does more than a larger number from years ago, because part of what a reader is checking is whether you are currently good.

3. Consistent details everywhere

Your business name, address and phone number should be identical everywhere they appear. Website, Google profile, Facebook, any directory, any listing.

Identical means identical. “Street” and “St” are different strings. Two phone numbers, even if both reach you, create ambiguity.

This matters for two reasons. Search engines use consistency across sources as a signal of legitimacy. And humans who notice a discrepancy feel a small flicker of doubt at exactly the wrong moment.

Search your own business name and see what comes up. You will usually find at least one listing you forgot existed, often with an old address or a disconnected number.

4. Location on your website, stated plainly

Your town should appear in your page titles, in your headings, and in your text, written the way a person would say it.

Not stuffed. One natural mention in the title, one in a heading, and normal use in the copy. “Roof repairs in Fall River and the surrounding area” is fine. Repeating the town name eleven times reads as manipulation to humans and does not help with search engines either.

If you serve multiple towns and genuinely work in all of them, a separate page for each can be worthwhile, but only if each page says something real about that area. Twenty near identical pages with the town name swapped is a well known pattern and it does not work.

Include your full address in text on the site, not only inside an image.

5. The site has to work on a phone

Page experience is a real ranking factor, and more importantly it decides whether someone who found you stays.

Google’s published threshold is that main content should render within 2.5 seconds at the 75th percentile of loads. Check yours in PageSpeed Insights, mobile score only.

This is covered in more depth elsewhere on this site, but it belongs on this list because local SEO advice frequently ignores it while it is often the largest single problem.

6. Local links and mentions

Being mentioned by other local sites helps, and the achievable versions are ordinary business activity rather than anything technical.

Chamber of commerce membership. Local trade associations. Sponsoring a youth team, which usually comes with a link from the club site. Supplier or manufacturer directories, which frequently list authorised installers and which businesses routinely forget to ask about. Local news coverage of anything you actually do.

You do not need many. A handful of genuine local mentions does more for a small business than any volume of purchased links, which range from useless to actively harmful.

What to ignore

Anyone promising a specific ranking position. Nobody controls that and the promise is a tell.

Automated directory submission to hundreds of sites. Mostly worthless, and it creates inconsistent listings you then have to clean up.

Keyword stuffing. Repeating your town and service in unnatural density does not work anymore and reads badly to humans.

Buying links. Against guidelines, and risky.

Blogging daily for SEO. For a local business, one genuinely useful page answering a real customer question is worth more than fifty thin posts. The point of writing is to be useful to a person, and volume without usefulness is a well documented dead end.

The realistic effort

Set aside one afternoon for the Google profile, done thoroughly. Set aside one more for auditing your name, address and phone consistency across everything you can find, and fixing your website’s location signals.

Then the ongoing work is: ask for reviews as a habit, respond to them within a couple of days, update photos occasionally, and fix your hours before holidays.

That is genuinely most of it for a local business. Everything past that is refinement, and refinement is a poor use of attention while the fundamentals are incomplete, which for most businesses they are.

Start with the profile. Check it right now, in a private browsing window, the way a stranger sees it, next to your two nearest competitors.

The pages worth writing, if you write any

For a local business, one genuinely useful page beats fifty thin ones, and there are only a few types worth the effort.

The specific service in the specific place, where you actually work there and the page says something real about that area. Not a template with the town name swapped.

The question customers actually ask, answered properly. You know what these are because you answer them on the phone every week. Each one is a page, and each one catches people searching that exact question.

What things cost, and why. Pricing pages attract high intent search traffic and almost nobody writes them, because businesses are nervous about publishing figures. A page explaining how pricing works, what drives it, and a typical range, does more than most of what passes for content marketing.

Three pages of that quality outperform thirty posts about industry news that nobody searched for.

Checking whether any of it worked

Rankings are the wrong measure. Two better ones, both free.

Google Search Console tells you what people actually searched before seeing you, and how often they clicked. This is the single most useful free tool in local SEO and a surprising number of businesses have never connected it. It shows you real queries from real people, which is better than any keyword research.

The insights on your Google Business Profile show how people found you, whether they searched your name or your category, and what they did next. Category searches mean you are being discovered. Name searches mean your reputation is doing the work.

Check both quarterly. Not weekly.

What to expect, honestly

Local SEO is slow and it is not dramatic. Changes take weeks to show, results vary with how competitive your area is, and nobody can promise you a position.

What is reliable is that the fundamentals compound. A complete profile, consistent details, steady recent reviews and a fast site do not stop working. Unlike advertising, you are not renting the result.

The businesses that do well at this are rarely doing anything clever. They completed the profile, they ask for reviews as a habit, their site loads, and their details agree with themselves. That is genuinely most of it, and most of their competitors have not done it.

Multiple locations, briefly

If you operate from more than one place, a few rules change.

Each location needs its own Google Business Profile with its own address, phone and hours. Do not run two locations from one listing.

Each needs a page on your website with its own address in text, its own phone, and content that genuinely differs. Duplicated pages with the town name swapped are a recognised pattern and they do not work.

If you have one office but serve a wide area, that is different. Set a service area on the profile rather than creating fake locations. Listings at addresses you do not occupy are against Google’s guidelines and businesses do get removed for it.

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Review platform figures cited from BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2025. Core Web Vitals thresholds published by Google at web.dev. No ranking outcomes are promised anywhere in this article, because nobody can promise them.

An advertisement is you saying you are good. A review is somebody else saying it. Those two things are not close in persuasive weight, and one of them is free.

That is the whole argument, and most business owners already accept it in principle. The gap is between accepting it and doing anything about it. Almost every business I look at has dramatically fewer reviews than its volume of satisfied customers would predict, for one unremarkable reason: nobody ever asks.

What the research actually supports

There are a lot of review statistics circulating and a fair number of them are unreliable, so let me be careful about what is genuinely established and what is repetition.

BrightLocal has run a Local Consumer Review Survey annually for over a decade, and it is the most consistently useful public research on this. Two findings from their 2025 edition are worth carrying around.

First, Google dominates as the place people actually look. Around 83 percent of consumers use it to find reviews, well ahead of everything else. Local news sites, Yelp, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok all appear in their data at meaningfully lower rates. If you are going to concentrate effort in one place, the research points clearly at Google.

Second, very few people ignore reviews entirely. Around 4 percent say they never read them.

I want to flag what I am not going to tell you. You will encounter figures like “93 percent of consumers read reviews before buying” repeated constantly with no clear origin. Actual survey numbers move year to year and depend heavily on question wording, and BrightLocal’s own data shows the “always” and “regularly” responses declining between their 2024 and 2025 surveys. That is not what you would guess from how this topic is usually discussed, and it is a good reason to be suspicious of anyone quoting a suspiciously round and dramatic number at you.

The honest version is narrower and still decisive. Most people check. Most of them check on Google. That is enough to act on without inflating it.

Why you have fewer than you should

Ask a business owner why they do not have more reviews and you get a small set of answers, all of them understandable and none of them good.

“I feel weird asking.” This is the main one. It feels like fishing for compliments or imposing on somebody who already paid you.

Reframe it. You are not asking for a favour, you are asking somebody to spend ninety seconds helping other people in their position make a decision. Most satisfied customers are glad to. The awkwardness lives almost entirely on your side of the conversation.

“I ask and they don’t do it.” Usually true, and usually a timing and friction problem rather than a willingness problem. See below.

“I don’t want to bother people.” You are not going to bother them by asking once, warmly, at the moment they told you they were happy. You would bother them by asking four times.

“I have some already.” Recency matters more than volume for the question most people are actually asking, which is whether you are currently operating and currently good. Eight reviews from this year beats thirty from four years ago.

The two things that make asking work

Almost all the improvement comes from two changes, and neither is about persuasion.

Ask at the moment of expressed satisfaction. Not a week later, not in a batch email at month end. At the moment the customer says out loud that they are pleased. Right then, while the feeling is present and you are in front of them.

This single change transforms results more than anything else, because you are asking a person who is currently feeling grateful rather than a person who has moved on to other things and now has to reconstruct the feeling from memory.

Remove every step you can. Google provides a short link that opens the review form directly. Get it, save it, and put it in a text message template on your phone.

The difference between “you can find us on Google” and a link that opens the right box on the first tap is enormous. Every intermediate step loses a meaningful share of the people who genuinely intended to help you. They are not being difficult, they are being normal. Nobody completes a scavenger hunt as a favour.

The script

Keep it short and do not over-engineer it.

In person, after they have said something nice: “That’s really good to hear, thank you. Would you mind putting that on Google? It genuinely helps people find us. I can text you the link right now, it takes about a minute.”

Then send it while you are standing there.

Follow up message, if you did not catch them in person: “Thanks again for having us out, glad it worked out. If you have a spare minute, a quick Google review would be a real help. Here’s the link.”

That is it. No paragraph about how much it means to a small business, no mention of stars, no incentive. Incentives are against platform policy in most cases and, more practically, they produce reviews that read as purchased, because they were.

Responding, which most businesses skip

The reply is where the actual leverage sits, and it is largely unused.

Reply to positive reviews briefly. Two sentences. Mention something specific about the job if you can, because specificity signals a real person read it rather than a template. This costs a minute and it demonstrates to every future reader that somebody is home.

Reply to negative reviews without arguing. This is the important one and it is worth being clear about who the reply is for.

It is not for the reviewer. That relationship is usually already settled and you are unlikely to change their mind in public.

It is for the next twenty people who read it while deciding about you. And here is the thing those readers are actually doing: they are not adjudicating who was right. They cannot, they have one side of it. They are assessing what kind of business you are when something goes wrong.

A calm, non defensive reply that acknowledges the frustration and offers to sort it out privately reads as a competent business having a bad day. A long rebuttal correcting the record reads as a business that will argue with you, which is exactly what a prospective customer is afraid of.

The counterintuitive result is that a handful of negative reviews with good replies can be more reassuring than a perfect record, because a perfect record looks curated and a well handled complaint is evidence of how you behave under pressure.

Never buy them

Beyond the platform risk, which is real, fake reviews are more detectable to ordinary humans than the people buying them believe.

A wall of five star reviews all written in the same register, with no specifics, appearing in clusters, does not read as a beloved business. It reads as what it is. Meanwhile a profile with fifteen specific reviews, a couple of them lukewarm, all clearly written by different people, is genuinely persuasive.

The mixed ones help. A profile with nothing but perfect scores invites suspicion. A four point seven with a couple of thoughtful three star reviews reads as real, because it is.

The routine

Ask every satisfied customer, once, at the moment they say they are happy. Not a campaign. A habit attached to the end of a job.

Have the link ready on your phone. Saved in a text template. If getting the link is a task you have to do each time, you will not do it each time.

Reply to everything within a couple of days. Set a recurring reminder if you need one.

Check your profile monthly. New reviews, unanswered ones, anything that needs a response.

That is the entire system. It costs almost nothing, it compounds, and unlike advertising it does not stop working the moment you stop paying.

The businesses with strong review profiles are very rarely the ones with better work than yours. They are the ones who ask.

Getting the link, since this is where people stall

The single tap review link is the difference between intention and completion, so here is how to actually get it.

Sign in to your Google Business Profile, either through the dashboard or by searching your own business name while signed in as the owner. There is an option to ask for reviews, and it produces a short link specific to your business that opens the review box directly.

Save that link somewhere you will find it in a hurry. A note on your phone home screen, a saved text message template, a line in your invoice footer, a QR code on a card you hand over.

The reason this matters more than it sounds: the gap between “look us up on Google and leave a review” and a link that opens the right box is the difference between a task and a tap. People who fully intend to help you will lose the task somewhere between your van pulling away and getting the kids to bed.

Where else, if anywhere

Google first, always, given it dominates where people look. But a few situations justify effort elsewhere.

Facebook matters if your local community organises there, because recommendations in local groups often reference it.

Industry specific platforms matter where they are genuinely used in your trade. Checkatrade, Houzz, TripAdvisor and their equivalents dominate in particular sectors, and if yours is one of them your customers are looking there regardless of what the general research says.

Your own site should show a few, with names, near the top of the page rather than buried at the bottom.

What is rarely worth it is spreading review requests across five platforms. You get a thin presence everywhere instead of a credible one where it counts, and you spend your single ask on the wrong place.

When a review is unfair

It happens. Someone reviews a business they never used, or describes something that did not occur, or is angry about something outside your control.

Report it if it genuinely violates platform policy, which usually means it is not about a real experience with your business. Do this once and then let it go, because the process is slow and outcomes are inconsistent.

Then reply anyway, calmly, and do not litigate. Something close to: “I am sorry you had a poor experience. I do not have a record of this job, but I would genuinely like to look into it. Please get in touch directly.”

That reply does two things. It signals to readers that you take complaints seriously, and it quietly indicates uncertainty about whether this person was a customer, without accusing anybody of anything.

Readers are more perceptive about this than owners fear. A single strange review among fifteen credible ones reads as a strange review. What damages you is not the complaint. It is a defensive, lengthy, point by point rebuttal, which reads as a preview of what arguing with you would be like.

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Review behavior figures cited from BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2025, including the roughly 83 percent of consumers using Google to find reviews and the roughly 4 percent who never read them. Widely circulated review statistics without a clear named source are deliberately not repeated here.

There is a page representing your business that most of your potential customers will see, and it is probably not your website.

It is the box that appears on the right side of the search results, or at the top on a phone, with your name, your hours, your rating, a row of photos and a couple of buttons. Google calls it a Business Profile. Most people call it “the Google thing.” Plenty of business owners do not realize they control it at all.

For a local business, that panel usually gets far more attention than the website does, for a simple structural reason: it arrives first, it answers the immediate question, and a large number of people never need to click past it. They wanted your hours, or your phone number, or to see whether the reviews were decent. They got all three without leaving the search results.

Which means the thing you have never touched is doing more selling than the thing you paid for.

What people actually use it for

The panel is not a marketing surface in the way a website is. Nobody reads it for persuasion. They read it to resolve a specific question, usually one of about five:

Are you open right now? Where exactly are you? What is the phone number? Do people like you? What does the place look like?

That is close to the entire list. And notice how brutally practical it is. There is no room in there for your story, your values, or your years of experience. It is a utility. The businesses that do well with it treat it like a utility and make sure it answers those five questions perfectly.

The businesses that do badly with it are usually not doing anything wrong exactly. They just never finished. The profile got claimed at some point, a few fields got filled in, and then it sat.

The parts people leave blank

Here is what I find missing most often, roughly in order of how much it costs.

Hours, including holiday hours. An empty hours field is bad. Wrong hours are worse. If somebody drives to your shop on a Saturday because Google said you were open, you have not just lost a sale, you have produced an actively angry person who is now within one tap of writing a review about it. Holiday hours are the specific trap, because the default assumption is normal hours and almost nobody remembers to set the exception.

Photos that you chose. Every profile has photos. The question is whose. If you have never uploaded any, the images representing your business are whatever customers happened to take, which tends toward blurry phone shots of parking lots and the least flattering corner of the room. This is the single most fixable thing on the list and I am amazed how often it goes untouched. You can take better photos than that with the phone in your pocket, in twenty minutes, today.

The description. Short, plain, in your own words. Not keyword soup. It is read by humans deciding whether you sound like a real business.

Services or products. Most categories let you list what you actually do, individually. This is worth the half hour it takes because it lets you say “we do that” in the exact words a customer used, and because a blank one implies a business that has not thought about it.

Attributes. Wheelchair accessible, parking available, appointment required, whatever your category offers. These look trivial and they are not, because for the person who needs that specific thing, it is the entire decision.

The reviews part, honestly

Reviews are the piece of this that business owners find most stressful, and there is a lot of nonsense written about them, so let me be careful about what is actually known.

BrightLocal has run a survey of local consumer review behavior every year for over a decade. It is the most consistently useful public research on this, and it is worth reading yourself rather than trusting anyone’s summary of it, including mine.

Two findings from their 2025 edition that I think are genuinely useful. First, Google is by a wide margin the most used platform for finding reviews, cited by around 83 percent of consumers, ahead of everything else including Yelp and Facebook. Second, the share of people who say they never read reviews at all is very small, around 4 percent.

I want to flag something about the wider category of review statistics, because you will encounter a lot of them and many are unreliable. Figures like “93 percent of consumers read reviews before buying” get repeated endlessly with no clear source, and the actual survey numbers move around year to year and depend heavily on exactly how the question was worded. BrightLocal’s own data shows the “always” and “regularly” responses declining between their 2024 and 2025 surveys, which is not what you would guess from the way this topic is usually discussed.

So the honest summary is narrower than the usual pitch, and still enough to act on. Most people check. Most of them check on Google specifically. That is sufficient reason to take your Google reviews seriously without needing to inflate it.

What to do about reviews without being weird about it

Ask, at the right moment. The right moment is immediately after the thing went well and the customer said so out loud. Not a week later in a mass email. Right then, in person or in the follow up message, while they are still pleased.

Make it one tap. Google gives you a short link that opens the review form directly. Get that link, put it in a text message template, and stop sending people on a scavenger hunt through the app.

Respond to all of them. This is the part with the best return and the lowest effort. Respond to the good ones briefly and warmly. Respond to the bad ones without arguing.

On that second point: the reply to a negative review is not written for the person who left it. That relationship is usually already decided. It is written for the next twenty people who read it while deciding about you. Those readers are not checking whether you were right. They are checking whether you are the kind of business that gets defensive. A short, non defensive reply that offers to sort it out privately does more for you than winning the argument ever could.

Never buy them. Beyond the obvious platform risk, fake reviews read as fake to actual humans far more often than the people buying them believe. A profile with a handful of specific, slightly mixed, clearly real reviews is more persuasive than a wall of five star sentences that all sound like the same person wrote them, because that is exactly what happened.

The photo problem, specifically

I want to spend a moment on photos because it is the item where the gap between effort and payoff is widest.

The photos on a Google profile are the only visual evidence most people will ever see. They are looking at them to answer a question that they would never say out loud: does this place look like somewhere I want to go, or send my money to?

You do not need a photographer. You need daylight and a few minutes. Shoot near a window or outside, in the morning or late afternoon rather than midday. Clean the frame of clutter first, because the camera notices mess that your eye has stopped seeing. Take far more than you need and delete most of them.

Cover the obvious set: the outside of the building including whatever a person would use to recognize it from the road, the inside, the work itself, and the people who do it. That last one matters more than owners expect. A face makes a business feel real in a way that no amount of interior photography does.

Then update them occasionally. Not constantly. A profile whose photos are visibly a decade old is telling on itself.

An afternoon, once, then a few minutes a month

The reason I lead with this topic when someone asks where to start is that the effort curve is unusual. Almost everything else in marketing needs sustained work to matter. This one is mostly a single sitting.

Fill in every field. Every one, including the ones that seem pointless. Take and upload twenty decent photos. Write the description. List the services. Set the hours and set the holiday exceptions. Get your review link and save it somewhere you will find it.

Then the ongoing job is small: respond to reviews as they come in, fix the hours before holidays, add a few new photos when something changes.

That is not a marketing strategy. It is closer to unlocking the front door before opening. But it is the highest return afternoon available to most local businesses, it costs nothing, and an enormous number of businesses have simply never done it.

Go and look at yours. Not the version you remember setting up. The version a stranger sees right now, in a private browsing window, next to your two closest competitors.

That comparison is the whole assignment.

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Review behavior figures cited from BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2025. Where this site uses numbers, they are either measured with free public tools or attributed to a named source. Estimates are always labeled as estimates.