Local SEO for a small business: what to do first, and what to ignore

You have got the website up, and you are now wondering why the phone is not ringing more. Soon somebody will offer to fix that for a monthly fee, and the offer will be a list of forty things with no order to it. This is the order. It is written for a business with one location or a service area, no marketing team, and a few hours a week, and the first two items are free.

The profile first, because it is free and it is most of the map

When somebody nearby searches for what you do, the three businesses in the map box get most of the calls, and those three are chosen mostly from their Google Business Profiles. A profile that was set up once and never touched is the commonest reason a good business is not in the box.

Work through it in this order. The primary category, which decides which searches you are eligible for at all, and the secondary categories, which most profiles leave empty. The services, listed one by one with a line of description each. Opening hours, including the holidays. Photographs, a few new ones every month, of the work and the premises. The questions and answers section, which you can seed with the questions customers ask on the phone. Every one of those is something Google reads, and every one is empty on most of your competitors' profiles.

Reviews: recent beats many

A business with forty reviews and five from this month beats one with a hundred and none since last year. Ask every customer at the moment the job is done, by text, with the direct link to your review form. Reply to every review, the good ones with thanks and the bad ones with facts and a phone number. Never buy them and never ask staff to write them; the profiles that get suspended for reviews are the ones that did.

One page per service, written for the place you serve

A services page that lists twelve things in a row ranks for none of them. Each service that brings in real work needs its own page, written about that service, for the town or area you serve, with the questions people ask before they book answered on it. Three good pages beat twelve thin ones, so start with the three services that make the most money.

If you travel to customers, hide the address on the profile and set the service area to the places you genuinely drive to. A page for every town in the county, all saying the same thing, is the pattern Google has spent a decade learning to ignore.

Citations: the short list

Your name, address and phone number on the directories that matter, identical everywhere, and the old wrong ones corrected. There are perhaps ten listings worth the effort for a small business and none worth buying by the hundred. The full working is in the guide to local SEO citations, including which ones to leave alone.

What to ignore for now

Offers to build you links; the ones cheap enough for a small business are the ones that get a site penalised. Blog posts about your industry that nobody in your town searches for. Ranking reports, which show a position and never a customer. A new website, unless the current one cannot be edited at all. And anything sold by the month before anybody has looked at your profile, because the profile is where the first calls come from and it costs nothing.

The two numbers

Only two figures tell you whether any of this paid. Calls and direction requests from the Business Profile, which Google shows you in the profile's own insights. And enquiries from the website, which means a form that emails you and a phone number that is tracked, so that a call from the site can be told apart from a call from a van. Watch those two each month. If they move, keep going; if they do not after three months, something above was skipped, and it is usually the pages.

When to get help

Everything here is work you can do yourself, and the profile half of it is worth doing whatever else you decide. The local SEO checklist is the long version, and there are guides written per trade for dentists, plumbers, law firms and the rest. If you would rather it was done for you, with calls as the measure, that is the local SEO service, scoped on a call before anything starts.