Almost everything written about local SEO is aimed at businesses with someone whose job it is to do local SEO. If you have a truck, a phone and about two hours, most of it is noise.
Four things do most of the work in whether you appear when somebody nearby searches for what you do. Google does not publish how it ranks local results, so treat this as the order practitioners generally agree on rather than a formula. Get these done before you spend money on anything else.
1. Fill out your Google Business Profile completely
This is the free listing that puts you in the map box above the normal results. It is the single highest leverage thing on this page and most profiles are half empty.
Complete means genuinely complete:
- Categories. Your primary category matters more than any other single field. Be specific. "Plumber" beats "Contractor." If you mostly do drain work, look for the drain category and set the general one as secondary. You can have several secondary categories, so use them.
- Service area. If you go to customers rather than them coming to you, set the service area and hide your address. If you have a real storefront, show it.
- Hours, including holidays. Wrong hours cost you calls and quietly hurt you. If the profile says open and you are not, people notice.
- Services, individually listed. Not one line saying "plumbing." Each service you actually want to be called about, with a sentence each.
- Photos, and real ones. Your truck, your work, you. Stock photography is obvious and does nothing. Add some every month rather than twenty once.
- The description. Write it for a person deciding, not for a search engine. Say what you do, where, and what makes you different.
Set a recurring reminder to look at this every quarter. Profiles drift, and Google sometimes accepts edits from the public that you did not make.
2. Make your name, address and phone identical everywhere
This is the least interesting item on the list and the one most likely to be quietly broken.
Your business name, address and phone number appear on your website, your Google profile, Yelp, Facebook, whatever directory listed you without asking, the invoice template you have used since 2019, and a trade association page you forgot about.
If those disagree, search engines have to guess which version is you. Two phone numbers is the common one, usually because you got a new line and never updated the old listings. Suite numbers are the other: "Suite 4," "Ste 4," "#4."
Pick one exact form of each. Write it in a note on your phone. Then go and make every listing match it, character for character. It is a dull afternoon and it does more than any amount of blog writing.
3. Get reviews, steadily, and reply to them
Reviews do two jobs. They influence where you rank in the map results, and they decide whether the person who found you calls you or the shop below you. There is a whole piece on asking for them without breaking Google's rules; the short version is below.
The pattern matters more than the total. Forty reviews spread over two years beats forty that all arrived in one week, which looks bought and sometimes is treated that way. A steady trickle is the goal.
The mechanics of asking are worth doing properly, and there is a separate piece on this site about the timing and the exact link to use. The short version: ask within about ninety minutes of finishing, send a direct link, never gate or pay for them, and reply to every review including the good ones.
4. Have a page for each thing you do, in each place you do it
This is the only part that resembles traditional SEO, and it is last for a reason. It does nothing if the three above are broken.
A single page that says "plumbing services in the greater metro area" competes for nothing. Separate pages for the specific work in the specific places do compete, because that is how people search. Nobody types "plumbing services greater metro area." They type "water heater replacement Fairview."
You do not need many. Take your three or four highest value services and your two or three main towns, and write a real page for each pairing. Real means:
- The actual problem, described the way a customer describes it.
- What you do about it, and roughly what it costs.
- How long it takes and what happens on the day.
- Something specific to that town. The neighborhoods, the housing stock, the fact that half the homes there have a particular kind of system.
That last point is what separates a useful page from spam. If you could swap the town name and the page would read identically, you have written a template, and search engines are extremely good at spotting templates now. Write six good pages rather than sixty thin ones.
What is not worth your time yet
Buying links. It is against Google's guidelines, the risk sits with you, and the people selling them do not carry any of it.
Directory submission services. Most of these listings are worthless, and the service will create the inconsistent name and phone problem from item two while charging you monthly.
Keyword stuffing your business name. Adding "Best Plumber Fairview" to your Google profile name violates the guidelines, and competitors report it. Sometimes it works for a while. It is not a plan.
A blog, at this stage. Yes, including this one. If your profile is half empty and your phone number differs across three sites, writing articles is not the thing standing between you and the phone ringing.
The part nobody mentions
All of this is spent getting the phone to ring. That is the whole outcome. Every hour on your listing, every review, every service page is bought to produce one event, which is a stranger with a problem dialing your number.
So it is worth asking what happens next (there is a worksheet for what your missed calls cost). If those calls arrive while you are under a sink and go to voicemail, you have paid the entire cost of local SEO and are collecting none of the return. The work above is real and you should do it. Just finish the job.
The short version
Complete your Google profile properly and check it quarterly. Make your name, address and phone identical everywhere. Ask for reviews steadily and reply to all of them. Then write a handful of genuinely specific service and town pages. None of it is a guarantee, and anyone selling you one is worth walking away from, but this is the part you control and it is where the money is best spent first.