Local SEO: getting found by nearby customers

By Jo van Vuuren — Fractional CMO

Local SEO is the part of search engine optimisation (SEO, or getting your website to show up on Google) that focuses on customers searching nearby. If you run a shop, a trade, a clinic, a restaurant or anything else that serves a particular area, this is often the single most useful thing you can do online, because it puts you in front of people who are ready to buy right now, not people browsing from the other side of the country.

What is local SEO, in plain terms?

It is the set of things that help your business show up when someone nearby searches for what you do: “electrician in [town]”, “dog groomer near me”, “best florist [area]”. Rather than competing with businesses across the whole country, you are competing with the handful actually near your customer, which is a much easier fight to win.

What is a Google Business Profile, and why does it matter?

A Google Business Profile (the free listing that shows your opening hours, location, photos and reviews on Google Maps and in search results) is the backbone of local SEO. Claim yours if you have not already, and fill in every section properly: category, opening hours, service area, photos and a clear description of what you do. It is free, and for many small businesses it brings in more enquiries than the website itself.

I can put a number on that. When The Galley, a seafood restaurant in Topsham, relaunched this summer with its profile completed properly and bookings connected through Reserve with Google, August brought 51 bookings straight from Google Search and Maps (commission-free) and the restaurant went from fourth to first on Google for “restaurants Topsham”. No advertising was involved in any of that.

Do online reviews really make a difference?

Yes. Reviews do two jobs at once: they reassure a potential customer that you are trustworthy, and they signal to Google that real people are engaging with your business. Ask happy customers to leave a review after a good job, respond politely to every review you get, good or bad, and never buy or fake them: Google is good at spotting patterns that do not look genuine.

A steady trickle of new, genuine reviews tends to work better than a rush of them all at once, so build the habit of asking every satisfied customer instead of saving it for special occasions.

Why do your name, address and phone number need to match everywhere?

Wherever your business is listed online (your website, Google, Facebook, directories, trade bodies), the name, address and phone number should read exactly the same way each time. Small inconsistencies, such as “St” in one place and “Street” in another, confuse search engines about whether these are really the same business, which quietly undermines your local rankings. It is worth a slow afternoon checking every listing you can find.

Should you create pages for each area you serve?

If you serve more than one town or region, a short, genuinely useful page for each area can help: for example a separate page for “plumber in [town A]” and “plumber in [town B]”, each with real, specific detail, not the same text with the town name swapped. Thin, duplicated pages like that rarely help and can even work against you, so only do this where you can write something genuinely useful for each place.

None of this is complicated, and I would be overselling it to pretend otherwise: most of local SEO is admin. Checking listings, answering reviews, keeping opening hours current. Which is exactly why it does not get done, and why the businesses that do it quietly outrank the ones spending more money on cleverer things. Start with your Google Business Profile and your reviews, since those bring the quickest, most visible results, then work through the rest as time allows.