Local SEO Without an Agency

A local SEO agency will quote you somewhere between four hundred and two thousand a month, and for the first three months most of them will do four things. You can do all four yourself in an afternoon, and the reason they work is not secret: local search is mostly a question of whether Google can tell what you do, where you do it, and whether anyone has vouched for you.

This is the afternoon. In order, because the order matters, with what to skip and how to tell whether it worked.

What local search is actually deciding

When somebody searches for a plumber, a dentist or a dog groomer near them, the results split into two parts. There is a map with three businesses on it, and there are ordinary blue links underneath. The map is where the phone calls come from, and it is a different competition from the one below it.

Getting into the map pack is decided by three things: how relevant you look for that search, how close you are to the person searching, and how prominent you seem, which mostly means reviews and mentions. You cannot change your distance from a searcher. You can change the other two, and almost nobody in your category has bothered to do it properly.

That is the good news in this whole subject. Local search is not a hard competition, it is a neglected one. The bar is a business that has filled everything in, keeps it current, and asks for reviews.

Job one: finish your Google Business Profile properly

This is the highest-return hour in local marketing and it is free. Most local businesses claimed their profile years ago, filled in the name and phone number, and never went back. The half that is missing is the half that decides which searches you show up for.

• Primary category, chosen carefully. This single field does more than anything else on the profile. Pick the most specific one that actually describes the money-making thing you do, not the broadest.
• Every service or product listed. Each one gives Google a phrase to match you against. A business with three services listed competes for three searches. One with twenty competes for twenty.
• Real opening hours, including the holidays. Wrong hours cost you a visit and a bad review from someone who drove over.
• Photos, more than you think, updated occasionally. The profile is a storefront and this is its window.
• The service area, if you travel to customers. A business without one is competing only where its pin sits.

There is more in the profile than fits here, and it is worth a session of its own: Your Google Business Profile Is a Free Storefront covers the parts most businesses never open, including the ones that quietly answer questions for you.

Job two: one real page for each thing you want to be found for

Most small business websites have a Services page listing eight services in a bullet list. That page can rank for one thing at best, because as far as a search engine is concerned it is a page about eight subjects, which means it is a page about nothing in particular.

The fix is unglamorous. Give each service you genuinely want customers for its own page, with a heading that names the service and the place, four hundred words that answer what it costs roughly, how long it takes, what is included and what is not, and a way to get in touch that is visible without scrolling.

Four hundred honest words beat two thousand padded ones, and they beat them twice over now that assistants are summarising pages rather than just ranking them. Write the answer a customer would get if they phoned you and asked.

If you serve several towns, resist the temptation to clone that page with the town name swapped. Google has recognised that trick for a decade and a stack of near-identical pages is worse than one good one. Write a real page for a town only when you have something real to say about working there.

Job three: ask for reviews, on purpose, every week

Reviews are the prominence half of the map pack, and they are the part where doing something ordinary consistently beats everything clever. The businesses at the top of your local results are rarely the best ones. They are the ones that ask.

Ask in person at the moment the customer is happiest, which is when the work is finished and they can see it. Then follow up with a message containing the direct link, because nobody searches for your profile to leave a review. Aim for a steady trickle rather than a burst: twenty reviews arriving in one week looks exactly like what it is.

Reply to all of them, including the bad ones, especially the bad ones. A calm, specific reply to a one-star review persuades more readers than the review itself puts off. What people are looking for in that exchange is whether you are the sort of business that fixes things.

Job four: make your name, address and phone number identical everywhere

This is the dullest job on the list and the one agencies charge the most for, under the name citation building. It amounts to this: every directory, social profile and listing that mentions your business should show the same name, the same address in the same format, and the same phone number.

Suite 4 in one place and Unit 4 in another is enough ambiguity to weaken the signal. An old phone number on a directory you forgot about sends real calls somewhere else. Spend an hour searching your business name, list every place it appears, and fix them one at a time.

You do not need a paid service to submit you to two hundred directories. Almost all of the value sits in the handful that people and search engines actually use: the map profile, the big local directories in your country, the industry body if you have one, and your own social accounts.

What to skip, whatever anyone sells you

• Buying links. Cheap link packages are the fastest way to a penalty and they are trivially detectable.
• Keyword stuffing your business name. Adding your town and service to the name on your profile is against the rules, gets reported by competitors, and risks the listing entirely.
• Two hundred directory submissions. The long tail of directories is nearly worthless and creates the exact inconsistency job four exists to remove.
• Monthly reports you cannot act on. A report with fifteen graphs and no decision in it is a retainer justifying itself.

How to tell whether any of it worked

Rankings are a poor measure locally, because everyone standing in a different place sees a different result. Use these instead, checked monthly, written in the same place each time.

1. Calls and direction requests from your profile. Google reports both. They are as close to a sale as a metric gets.
2. Enquiries that mention finding you on Google. Ask every caller how they found you and write it down. Two months of that beats any dashboard.
3. Review count and average, month by month. Slow and upward is the shape you want.
4. Which pages people arrive on from search. If it is only your homepage, job two has not landed yet.

Give it ninety days before drawing conclusions. Profile changes can show up in a fortnight, but new pages take longer to be crawled, ranked and trusted, and the review trickle needs weeks to become a pattern.

After that, the work drops to maintenance, which fits comfortably in the weekly routine described in The 30-Minute Marketing Week: check the numbers, ask a few customers for reviews, and write the next service page when you have one to write.