How to get your business found on Google locally

Local search is one of the few areas where a small business can beat a much larger one, because Google weights proximity and relevance heavily. But most local businesses lose on the basics rather than the clever stuff.

No guarantees here, and be suspicious of anyone who offers you one. This is what reliably helps.

Start with Google Business Profile

If you do one thing from this article, do this. It is free, it takes an hour, and for most local businesses it produces more enquiries than the website itself.

Your Business Profile is what shows in the map results and the panel on the right when someone searches your name. Claim it at google.com/business if you have not already.

Then actually finish it. Most profiles are half done:

• Exact category. "Bathroom remodeler" not "Contractor". Add secondary categories for your other services.
• Full service list. Every service, individually. This is a genuine ranking factor and almost nobody fills it in.
• Real photos, added regularly. Profiles with recent photos perform better. Add a few every month. It takes two minutes.
• Opening hours, kept accurate. Including bank holidays.
• Service area if you travel to customers rather than them coming to you.
• The Q&A section. You can ask and answer your own questions. Do it, and put your three most common ones there.
• Posts. Short updates, weekly-ish. Low effort, and it signals the profile is live.

Then get reviews, properly

Reviews affect both where you rank and whether anyone calls once they find you. A business with 40 reviews at 4.7 beats one with 3 reviews at 5.0, almost every time.

What works:

• Ask every satisfied customer, at the moment they are happy. Right after the job, not a week later.
• Make it one tap. Google gives you a short review link in your Business Profile. Put it in a text message. Do not make someone search for you.
• Reply to all of them. Good and bad. It shows the business is run by a human who is paying attention.
• Handle bad reviews calmly and publicly. A measured reply to an unfair review does more good than the review does harm. An angry one does the opposite.

What does not work: buying reviews. Google is good at spotting them and the penalty is worse than having none.

Now the website

With the profile sorted, the website's job is to back it up and to catch the searches that never touch the map results.

A page per service. This is the biggest structural win available. One page mentioning "kitchens, bathrooms, tiling and flooring" competes for nothing. Four pages, one per service, each compete properly.

Real page titles. Every page needs its own, describing that page and including the service and area where it fits naturally. "Bathroom Fitting in Potters Bar | Company Name" beats "Home".

Mention where you work, in real sentences. Not a list of forty towns in grey text at the bottom. Google has understood that trick for fifteen years. Write naturally about the areas you cover.

Speed. Slow sites rank worse and lose visitors regardless of rank. Large unoptimised photos are almost always the cause.

Mobile. Google indexes the mobile version of your site. If it is awkward on a phone, that is the version being judged.

Consistent name, address and phone number. Identical everywhere it appears: your site, your Business Profile, directories. Inconsistency creates doubt about which listing is real.

Location pages, done properly

If you cover several towns, you can have a page for each. This works, but only if the pages are genuinely useful.

A good location page has real content: which parts of that area you work in, jobs you have done there, things specific to that town. A bad one is the same 300 words with the town name swapped out, and Google has been filtering those out for years.

My rule: if you would not be comfortable showing the page to a customer from that town, do not publish it.

Realistic expectations

Timescale. Business Profile changes can show within days. Website changes typically take weeks to months. Anyone promising results in a fortnight is selling something.

Competition varies enormously. "Emergency plumber Barnet" is a fight. "Sash window restoration Potters Bar" might be almost empty. Being specific is usually easier than being general, and the specific search is often the better customer anyway.

Proximity matters and you cannot change it. You will rank better for searches near where you are based. This is why service-area businesses need location pages, and why a business three towns over is not necessarily beating you fairly.

The order to do this in

1. Claim and completely fill in your Google Business Profile.
2. Set up a system for asking every happy customer for a review.
3. Make sure your website has a proper page for each service.
4. Add page titles and descriptions that reflect what each page is about.
5. Fix your site speed, mostly by compressing images.
6. Add genuinely useful pages for the areas you cover.
7. Keep the profile alive with photos and posts.

Steps one and two are free and produce most of the result. Do those before spending anything on SEO.