When someone searches "electrician near me" or "dentist in Guildford", Google is answering a different question than for a national search. It is asking which nearby business is most relevant, most established and most trusted. Local SEO is simply the work of making those three things obvious.
Here is what actually moves the needle, roughly in order of impact.
Your Google Business Profile is the main event
For local searches, the map pack usually sits above the normal results. That listing comes from your Google Business Profile, not your website. Most businesses set one up years ago and never returned to it.
Work through all of it:
- Exact business name, address and phone number, matching your website exactly
- The most specific primary category available, plus relevant secondary categories
- Real opening hours, kept accurate around bank holidays
- Services listed individually, each with a short description
- Twenty or more genuine photos, added to over time rather than all at once
- Regular posts, even short ones about recent jobs
Profiles that are complete and active consistently outrank neglected ones in the same town.
Reviews are ranking signals, not just reassurance
Volume, recency, rating and whether you reply all matter. A steady trickle of new reviews beats forty reviews from 2021. Ask every happy customer, send them the direct review link, and reply to each one, including the difficult ones. Reviews that mention the service and the town are especially useful.
One proper page per service, per area
A single page listing every service in every town will not rank for any of them. Give each significant service its own page, written properly: what it involves, what it costs or what it depends on, how long it takes, examples of your own work, and the areas you cover.
If you serve several towns and genuinely work in each, a page per town can work — but only if it contains real, specific content about that area. Copies of the same page with the town name swapped are treated as thin content and can quietly hurt you.
Consistent details across the web
Google cross-checks your name, address and phone number against directories, social profiles and trade bodies. Old addresses and dead phone numbers create doubt. Pick the exact format you will use everywhere, then correct the major listings: Bing Places, Apple Maps, Yell, Checkatrade, Companies House and any trade associations you belong to.
The technical basics still decide things
Rankings assume the page works well:
- Loads fast on a mobile connection
- Passes Core Web Vitals, particularly layout stability and load speed
- Uses one clear H1 per page and sensible headings underneath
- Has descriptive page titles including the service and the location
- Has LocalBusiness structured data with your address, hours and area served
- Is fully crawlable, with a real sitemap and no accidental noindex tags
None of this is glamorous, and all of it is checkable.
Content that answers local questions
The articles that earn local traffic are the ones answering questions your customers actually ask: what something costs in your area, whether planning permission applies locally, how long a job takes, what to look for when choosing a supplier. Write those, link them to the relevant service page, and you build relevance for the whole site.
Links from your own area
A mention from a local newspaper, a nearby charity you sponsor, a supplier's stockist page or a local business network carries real weight because it ties you to the place. Sponsorships and community involvement you already do are usually the easiest wins.
How long it takes
Profile improvements and reviews can shift the map pack within weeks. Organic rankings for competitive service terms usually take three to six months of consistent work. Anyone promising page one in days is selling something else.
A sensible order of work
- Fix and fill out your Google Business Profile
- Start a genuine, ongoing review habit
- Fix speed and mobile problems on the site
- Build one strong page per service, then per area where honest
- Clean up your listings elsewhere
- Publish useful local content monthly
Done in that order, each step makes the next one work harder. That is the whole trick to local search.
