Nextdoor is a neighbourhood social network where verified residents of a local area post recommendations, questions and alerts, and where businesses can set up a free Business Page to be recommended and found by the people who live nearby. It is the written, searchable version of asking the neighbours who they use.
How Nextdoor works
Members join the neighbourhood that matches their home address, and Nextdoor asks them to verify that address. Because of that verification, the feed is made up of people who genuinely live within a few streets of each other, which is what gives a recommendation there its weight. A typical thread starts with someone asking for a reliable boiler engineer or a cleaner who can do Fridays, and fills up with replies naming local firms.
A Business Page is separate from a personal account. It holds your business name, category, contact details, service area, photos and opening hours, and it collects recommendations from members. Neighbours can recommend the page directly, and when they mention your business in a thread they can link to it, so readers reach your details in one tap. From the page you can also post updates and offers, and reply to people who mention you.
Nextdoor also sells advertising. At the time of writing (October 2026) businesses can buy sponsored posts and local deals that appear in the feed for chosen neighbourhoods or an area around an address, through a self-serve ads tool. Formats and minimum spends change, so check the options in your own account before planning a budget.
Why it matters
For a business that serves a small patch, such as a dog groomer in Walthamstow, a window cleaner in Headingley or a locksmith covering two postcode districts, Nextdoor is where a good share of word of mouth now happens in writing. Those threads are read by people who are about to choose someone, and the answers stay visible for whoever asks the same question next month.
It also supports your wider local SEO work. A Business Page is one more place where your name, address and phone number appear, so it acts as a local citation. And customers who are happy to recommend you to neighbours are usually happy to leave a Google review when asked.
The audience is uneven. Some neighbourhoods are lively and others barely post, and the network suits household services far more than business-to-business work. For most local service businesses it is worth an hour of setup; it is rarely worth an advertising budget until you know your area is active.
Common mistakes
- Posting sales messages into neighbourhood threads from a personal account. Members notice, it breaks the community guidelines, and it does more harm than staying quiet.
- Setting up a Business Page with details that differ from your Google Business Profile, such as an old phone number or a different trading name.
- Asking friends and relatives who have never used you to recommend the page. That misleads the people reading it, and the DMCC Act 2024 rules on fake reviews make it a risk not worth taking.
- Ignoring a negative mention. A calm public reply, or an offer to sort it out by message, reads far better than silence.
- Paying for ads before checking how active the target neighbourhoods are.
How to act on it
Claim or create a Business Page using exactly the same business name, address and phone number as your website and Google profile, because NAP consistency matters here as much as anywhere. Choose the most specific category, write a short description that says what you do and which areas you cover, and add real photos of your work.
Then ask satisfied customers who use Nextdoor to recommend your page, in the same way you would ask for an online review, without offering anything in return. Once a week, search the feed for threads about your trade in your area and answer genuine questions helpfully, saying openly that you run the business. If you later test Nextdoor ads, track the enquiries they bring separately, so you can compare the cost per enquiry with your other channels before spending more.