SEO
SEO for local businesses, without the nonsense
If you run a local business, you don't need to compete with the whole internet. You need to be found by people a few kilometres away who are searching right now. That's a much smaller, much winnable game.
Start with Google Business Profile
It's free, it takes an afternoon, and for most local businesses it's worth more than everything else combined. It's what puts you in the map results: the block that appears above the normal ones.
Fill in every field. Real photographs, correct hours including holidays, the services you offer, the areas you cover. Post an update occasionally. Reply to every review, including the bad ones, politely.
Use the words your customers use
You might call yourself a "cosmetic dental practitioner". Your customer types "teeth whitening near me". Guess which one to put on your website.
Listen to how people describe your work on the phone and write that down. That's your keyword research, and it's more accurate than most paid tools.
One page per thing you do
A single page listing eight services will lose to eight pages that each cover one properly. Google needs a page it can confidently return for a specific search.
Each page wants a clear heading, a genuine explanation, an honest indication of price if you can, and a way to get in touch.
- Give each service its own page with its own web address
- Mention the towns you serve, naturally, in real sentences
- Answer the questions customers actually ask you
- Include prices where you can, people search for them
Speed is part of SEO
Google measures how quickly your pages appear and how much they jump around while loading. So do your visitors, even if they'd never put it that way.
The most common culprit is enormous photographs uploaded straight from a camera. Resizing your images is often the single biggest improvement available to you.
What to ignore
Emails saying your site has errors and they can fix it. Anyone guaranteeing position one. Anyone selling backlinks. Stuffing your town name into every sentence until it reads like a robot wrote it.
Nobody can guarantee a position on Google, including Google. If someone guarantees it, that's the whole review of their service.
How long it takes
Local map results can shift within weeks. Ordinary rankings take three to six months of steady work. Anyone promising faster is either lucky or lying.
It's slow, it compounds, and it keeps paying long after you stop. That's the honest pitch.