Local SEO for businesses with one location

You are not competing with the whole internet. You are competing with about nine businesses within a few miles, and most of them have not done the basics.

Local SEO gets discussed as though it were the same discipline as ranking a national site. It is not, and the difference is good news: your competition is roughly nine businesses within a few miles, and most of them have done none of this.

Distance, relevance, prominence

Local results are decided by three things.

Distance you cannot change. Someone searching from the other side of the city is not your customer today.

Relevance is how well your listing matches what was typed. This is the one most businesses leave broken.

Prominence is how established you look. Reviews, mentions, links, consistency.

You have real control over two of the three. Spend your time there.

The listing is the website

For a local search, your business listing outranks your homepage in practice, because it answers the question without a click. Treat it as a page you own.

Categories. One primary, chosen precisely. "Dentist" and "Cosmetic dentist" are different searches with different competition. Pick the one that matches what you actually want to be called for, then add secondaries.

Services, written out. Every service, as its own entry, in the words a customer would use rather than the words the industry uses. People search "teeth whitening", not "aesthetic dental procedures".

Photographs, updated. Not once. A listing that has not had a new photograph in two years reads as a business that might have closed.

Questions. You can ask and answer them yourself, and you should, because otherwise the answers come from strangers who guess.

One page per location, and make it a real page

The most common mistake: an address in the footer and a contact form, called a location page.

A real one carries the address as text (not inside an image), the hours, embedded directions, the services offered at that location, and something a human wrote about the area. Parking. The landmark opposite. Which entrance to use.

That last part is not decoration. It is the only thing on the page that proves a person has been there, and it is what distinguishes you from a national chain's template page for the same postcode.

Consistency matters more than volume

Citations are your name, address and phone number on other sites. The instinct is to get as many as possible. The instinct is wrong.

What matters is that they agree. One listing with an old phone number does more damage than ten new listings do good, because the whole mechanism is a confidence check. Conflicting data lowers confidence.

Start with the ones that already exist and are wrong. Then add.

Reviews: ask, and ask at the right moment

Most businesses never ask. The ones that do usually ask badly, by email, three days later, when the visit has faded.

Ask when the person is still in front of you and visibly happy. That is the entire technique.

Two things to hold onto:

• A steady trickle beats a burst. Twelve reviews in one week after two silent years looks exactly like what it is.
• Reply to all of them. Including the good ones, briefly. It is a public signal that someone is paying attention.

What to ignore

Keyword-stuffing your business name. "Smith Plumbing | Emergency Plumber London 24/7" is against the rules, and it gets listings suspended rather than promoted.

Buying links from a directory nobody visits. If a human would not use the site to find a business, it is not doing anything for you.

Chasing rankings you cannot convert. Position three for a search that produces phone calls is worth more than position one for a search that produces nothing.

How to check whether it worked

Rankings move, and watching them daily will drive you mad. Look at these instead, monthly:

• Calls and direction requests from the listing itself. Both are counted for you.
• Which search terms produced them.
• Whether the terms are getting more specific over time.

That last one is the real signal. Ranking for "dentist" is vanity. Ranking for "emergency dentist open Sunday" is a booked appointment.