Local SEO guides, written per trade
Local SEO advice is usually written once and applied to everybody. It should not be. A plumber is fighting for a search made at two in the morning, a dentist for an appointment booked three weeks ahead, a law firm inside advertising rules that decide what the page is allowed to say. These are written one trade at a time.
Every one is work you can do yourself, written out in the order it pays to do it.
Trades that work at the customer’s property
Service area businesses. The address should be hidden, the radius should be the one you genuinely drive, and the emergency searches are decided before anybody reads your website.
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Local SEO for contractors
A contractor is usually a service area business, which changes how Google treats you before any of the work starts.
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Local SEO for plumbers
Plumbing is an emergency trade with a maintenance business attached, and the two need different pages.
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Local SEO for roofing companies
Roofing demand does not arrive evenly.
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Local SEO for HVAC contractors
Heating and cooling is the most seasonal trade in local search.
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Local SEO for home services
A home services business usually does several things: some plumbing, some electrical, some handyman work, maybe heating.
Practices people choose carefully
Appointment intent, credentials, insurance and reviews. The competition is usually a directory rather than the practice down the road.
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Local SEO for dentists
Dentistry is decided in the map pack and then in the reviews.
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Local SEO for doctors
Medical search is held to a higher standard than any other local category, because Google treats health as a subject where bad information does harm.
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Local SEO for therapists
Therapy is chosen differently from every other service in local search.
Legal
The widest gap between search volume and value anywhere in local search, and the only category where the advertising rules shape the pages before the SEO does.
More than one location
Where local SEO stops being marketing and starts being a data problem. Both of these are about structure rather than about a trade.
The whole subject, for one market
Legal is the market where the value per matter is high enough to justify effort on searches that would be uneconomic anywhere else, so it gets the long version.
AI search
What ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode need from a business before they name it, taken from the vendors’ own documentation, and a study of what AI answers are doing to clicks.
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Google AI Mode SEO
How query fan-out picks pages, and the calls and bookings AI Mode now makes for local businesses, with the settings that control them.
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ChatGPT SEO
OpenAI’s crawlers and what each one decides, the firewall check most sites miss, and ten checks in the order they cost least.
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Organic CTR by position: a study
Six months of Search Console data from 15 small sites against the published curves, and why those curves disagree with each other by a factor of 20.
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llms.txt example
The file, the format rules and whether you need one, with a live file to open.
The checklists
The parts that are the same whatever the trade, written out in full and in the order that finds the most. Nothing to sign up for and nothing to download.
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Local SEO checklist
The Google Business Profile, reviews, citations, location pages and how to measure whether any of it worked.
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SEO audit checklist
Indexing first, because a page Google cannot see cannot be fixed by anything further down the list.
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SEO migration checklist
What to record before anything moves, the redirect map, staging, launch day and the ninety days after, so a redesign or a new domain keeps the traffic it earned.
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On-page SEO checklist
The search a page is for, the three lines in the result, the heading, the answer, the images, the links and the next step, with the whole page drawn.
If you would rather it was done for you
The guides are free and the profile half of each one is worth doing whether or not you ever hire anybody. When you want it taken off your hands, these are the pages that explain what that looks like.
Book a call with us
A 30-minute call in your working hours. Tell us what you sell and where, and we will tell you what we would do first and what it involves. Prefer email? Send your website through the form and the Passieon Team will reply within two working days.