Local SEO is the work that decides whether your business shows up when someone nearby searches for what you do: “emergency plumber”, “dentist open Saturday”, “accountant near me”. Searches like these bring up a map with three businesses listed under it, known as the local pack, followed by the ordinary results. I work on both, for UK businesses whose customers come from a particular town, borough or county.
What local SEO fixes, and what changes when it works
Most owners who ask me about local search describe the same situation. Competitors with thinner websites sit in the map results, while their own business only appears when someone types its exact name. That gap rarely comes down to one setting. It is usually a mix of a profile in the wrong category, contact details that disagree across the web, a website with no page for the service being searched for, and fewer recent reviews than the businesses around it.
Google says local results are based mainly on three things: relevance to the search, distance from the searcher, and prominence, meaning how well known and well regarded the business is. Nobody can move your premises closer to every customer, so distance is the one factor you cannot work on. Local SEO works on the other two. When it is working, you see more calls from the profile, more requests for directions, and more enquiries from the service pages on your site. I measure each of those separately so you can see which one is moving.
Who local SEO suits, and who it does not
It suits a business with premises customers visit, such as a clinic, salon, restaurant, gym or solicitor’s office. It also suits a business that goes to its customers, such as a plumber, electrician, cleaner or mobile mechanic. Google calls the second kind a service-area business, and it can still appear in the map results with its address hidden, provided it has a real base that Google can verify.
It is the wrong service in a few cases. If you sell online across the UK and nobody visits or phones you locally, ordinary SEO will do more for you. If you have several branches, each one needs its own profile and its own page, and multi-location and franchise SEO is set up for exactly that. If your only address is a virtual office or a mail-forwarding service, Google’s guidelines do not allow a profile there unless the office is staffed during your opening hours, so that has to be resolved before any of this work is worth paying for.
I am based in London and Reading and take on local SEO clients across the UK. If your business is in one of those two places, my pages for London businesses and Reading businesses cover what is different about winning local searches there.
What the work covers
A local SEO project touches six areas. I work through them in order of what is holding your business back most, which differs from one business to the next.
Your Google Business Profile
The profile is what appears in the map pack, so I check it first: primary and secondary categories, the services listed, opening hours including bank holidays, photos of the real premises or the real work, and the website link. The primary category is the field I would get right before any other, because it tells Google which searches the business is relevant to. If your profile needs setting up from nothing, is stuck in verification or has been suspended, my Google Business Profile optimisation service deals with that on its own.
Local pages on your website
The profile points to your website, and Google reads the site to judge what the business does and where. Each main service needs a page of its own that says plainly what you do, which area you cover and how to book, with the full address and phone number written as text rather than inside an image. I also add structured data that states your name, address, hours and service area in a format search engines read directly. If the site has a crawling or speed problem that affects every page, technical SEO comes first, because local pages cannot help while Google struggles to reach them.
Directory listings and consistent contact details
Your business name, address and phone number also appear on other sites: Yell, Thomson Local, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, your trade association’s member directory. Google compares these records. When they disagree, because you moved premises, changed your number or traded under a slightly different name, it has less reason to trust any single version. I audit the listings you already have, correct or remove the wrong ones and add the few that matter in your sector. The aim is NAP consistency, the same name, address and phone number everywhere, not hundreds of directory entries.
Reviews
Google states that the number of reviews and your rating are part of how it judges prominence, and recent reviews with your replies are what a customer reads before choosing between three businesses on the map. I set up a simple routine for asking every customer, usually a short link sent by text or email once the job is done, and I write reply templates you can adapt. Google forbids offering anything in return for a review, and it forbids asking only the customers you expect to be happy, which is known as review gating. Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, fake reviews have also been banned in the UK since April 2025, so there is no shortcut worth taking here.
Local links and mentions
Links from other websites in your area feed the same prominence signal. The useful ones come from genuine involvement locally: a business improvement district or chamber, a supplier or partner, a sponsored youth football team, a feature on a local news site, a council or community events listing. I find the ones that fit your business and help you secure them, and I do not buy links. If you need a wider campaign that reaches beyond your area, link building is a separate service.
Tracking calls, directions and enquiries
The profile reports calls, direction requests and website clicks, but not what happens after someone lands on your site. I tag the website link on your profile, the same way the free UTM link builder does, so Google Analytics 4 can separate visits from the map listing from ordinary search visits. Where the phone is your main enquiry route, I can also set up call tracking on the website so you know which calls came from search. Without this, local SEO gets judged on rankings alone, and rankings say little about whether the phone is ringing.
How I run a local SEO project
- A short call about your area. Where your customers really come from, which services earn you the most, and whether you serve people at your premises, at theirs, or both.
- Audit and baseline. I review the profile, the website and the listings you already have. Then I check where you appear for your main searches from a grid of points across your area, because map results can change from one street to the next. That grid is the baseline every later report is measured against.
- Foundations. Contact details corrected everywhere, the profile completed, service pages and structured data in place. I do this before anything else because reviews and links built on top of conflicting details are partly wasted.
- Prominence. Reviews, a small number of well-chosen listings, local links, and profile updates where they suit the business. This is the slower part and continues month by month.
- Monthly review. A short report and a call: what changed on the grid, what the profile and the site produced, and what I plan to do next and why.
Problems I find most often on UK local sites
- The registered office used as the trading address. Many limited companies register at their accountant’s office. That address then turns up in directories and website footers, so Google sees two locations for one business.
- Several versions of the phone number. An 020 landline on the website, a mobile on the profile and an old 0845 number still on a directory give Google three numbers to reconcile for one business.
- Town pages that differ only by the place name. Thirty near-identical pages for every town inside the M25 rarely rank, and Google’s spam policies can treat them as doorway pages. A page about an area needs something true and specific to say about it, or it should not exist.
- Keywords added to the business name. A profile called “Smith Plumbing Emergency Plumber Croydon” breaks Google’s guidelines, and once someone reports it, the name can be edited back or the profile suspended.
- An old address nobody cleaned up. After a move, the profile gets updated but the previous premises live on across a dozen directories, sometimes with a second Google listing still showing it.
- No routine for reviews. A burst of reviews at launch, then nothing for a year, while the competitors on the map collect a few every month.
What you receive
- A written audit of your profile, website and directory listings, with each fix ranked by how much it is likely to matter for your business.
- A baseline ranking grid for your main searches, repeated each month from the same points so the comparison is fair.
- The changes themselves, either made by me or written up clearly for your web developer.
- A record of every directory listing, with the logins held in the business’s name.
- A monthly report covering profile calls, direction requests and website clicks, enquiries from your local pages, new reviews and the grid, with a note of what comes next.
Next step
If you want to know where you stand before committing to anything, request a free SEO audit and say in your message that local customers matter most to you, so I start with the parts of the site that serve them. If you would rather do the work yourself, my step-by-step local SEO guide takes you through it in the order I would tackle it.