“Improve your online presence” is advice small businesses hear all the time, usually with no detail on what to do next. For a local business it’s less mysterious than it sounds. When someone nearby searches for what you do, Google decides which businesses to show mainly on three things: relevance, distance and prominence. You can’t move your premises closer to every customer, but you can do a lot about the other two, and most of it costs time rather than money.
Here’s where to put that time, roughly in order of priority.
Get your Google Business Profile right first
Your Google Business Profile (plenty of people still call it “Google My Business”, although Google renamed it in 2021) is the panel with your hours, phone number, photos and reviews that appears in Google Search and Maps. For many customers it’s the first thing they see, before they ever reach your website.
Google’s own tips to improve your local ranking are refreshingly plain: verify the business, keep the information complete and accurate, add photos and respond to reviews. In practice that means:
- choosing the most specific primary category that fits (Google’s example is “Nail salon” rather than “Salon”)
- keeping opening hours correct, including special hours for bank holidays
- adding recent photos of your premises, team or finished work
- listing your services and describing each one properly
The same page states that there’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking, so be wary of anyone who promises one. We cover the most common slip-ups in more detail in Google Business Profile mistakes that cost you enquiries.
Keep your business details identical everywhere
Your business name, address and phone number (often shortened to NAP) appear in far more places than your website and profile: Bing Places, Apple Maps, Yell, Facebook, trade association directories, your local chamber of commerce and supplier websites. Each of these mentions is called a citation, and you probably didn’t create many of them yourself, because directories often copy details from one another.
This matters because Google doesn’t rely only on what you tell it. Its help pages explain that Business Profile information is compiled from a variety of sources, including crawled web content, licensed data from third parties and details contributed by users. When those sources disagree, Google has to work out which version is right, and a customer who rings an old number and gets no answer will simply try someone else.
Take a fictional example. Say “Brookmill Glazing” moved from a unit on Station Road to new premises across town two years ago and changed its phone number at the same time. The website and Business Profile were updated straight away, but Yell, a trade directory and an old Facebook page still show the old unit and a number that no longer connects. Nothing is wrong with the business itself, yet anyone relying on those listings hits a dead end, and Google sees mixed signals about where the business is.
The usual causes are:
- Moving premises, where the website and profile get updated but the smaller listings don’t.
- Changing phone number, which is easy to miss because a dead number gives no obvious warning.
- A name change or rebrand, including small ones such as adding or dropping “Ltd” in some places.
- Duplicate Business Profiles set up by different people over the years. Google’s guidelines allow one profile per location, so duplicates should be removed rather than kept for “extra visibility”.
To check where you stand, search your business name, then search it again alongside any old address or phone number you’ve used. Next, check the main platforms directly: Google, Bing Places, Apple Maps, Yell, Facebook and any trade body or professional register in your industry. Claim and correct those first. Obscure directories you can’t log in to are rarely worth chasing one by one; once the important listings agree, the odd stale entry matters far less.
Choose one exact format for your name, address and number, and use it everywhere, including your website footer.
Ask for reviews, and reply to them
Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help a business’s local ranking, and reviews are what many people read before deciding whether to call.
Businesses that collect reviews steadily usually just ask at the right moment: straight after a job is finished and the customer is happy, using the review link or QR code available from your Business Profile. Ask every customer, not only the ones you expect to be glowing, and don’t offer anything in return. Google’s review policies prohibit incentives and selectively asking for positive reviews.
Reply to reviews too, including the critical ones. A calm, specific reply to a negative review shows future customers how you deal with problems, which is often exactly what they’re trying to find out.
Make your website clear within seconds
A visitor should be able to tell what you do, where you work and how to get in touch almost as soon as the page loads. When a small business website underperforms, the cause is more often vague wording than poor design: a headline that could describe any company, a phone number hidden in the footer, or a services page that lists everything without explaining anything.
Fixing that rarely needs a redesign. Our guide to getting more enquiries from your website goes through the quick wins.
Help search engines read your details with structured data
Structured data (often called schema markup) is code on a page that labels information for search engines: this is the business name, this is the address, these are the opening hours. It uses a shared vocabulary from schema.org, and for a local business the relevant type is LocalBusiness or a more specific version of it. Many website platforms and SEO plugins can add the basics without you touching any code.
It’s useful housekeeping, but it helps to know what it won’t do:
- It won’t put review stars on your own listing. Since 2019, Google hasn’t shown review stars for reviews a business hosts about itself. Its review snippet guidelines say pages using LocalBusiness or Organization markup are ineligible when the business controls the reviews about itself, and that includes embedded Google or Facebook review widgets.
- FAQ markup no longer produces rich results. Google limited FAQ rich results to well-known government and health websites in August 2023, then stopped showing them in Google Search altogether in May 2026.
- It isn’t needed for AI Overviews. Google says no special markup is required to appear in its AI features.
The key rule is that structured data must match what visitors can see. Google’s structured data guidelines say not to mark up content that isn’t visible on the page, and even correct markup doesn’t guarantee any special display. The most common problem is markup that has gone stale: the business moves or changes number, the page text is updated, but the code still carries the old details. That’s the same consistency problem as out-of-date listings, just on your own site.
Google’s free Rich Results Test shows what structured data it can read from any page and flags errors. Run your homepage and main service pages through it whenever your address, phone number or hours change.
Local SEO is more than a town name in a page title
Adding “Gloucester” or “Bristol” to a page title can help a little, but relevance comes from content that answers what people nearby are searching for. If you serve a few distinct areas, a page for each can work well, provided each one says something specific: the jobs you do there, how quickly you can get there, photos of local work. A dozen near-identical pages with only the town name swapped are unlikely to help and can fall foul of Google’s spam policies on doorway pages.
Working out which services and areas deserve their own pages, before anyone starts writing, is a big part of our SEO consultancy work.
Use Google Ads while SEO builds
SEO usually takes months to show results. If you need enquiries sooner, or want to appear for searches you don’t rank for yet, Google Ads can fill the gap. It works best as a partner to SEO rather than a replacement: the search terms report in an ads account shows exactly what people typed before they got in touch, which is excellent evidence for deciding what your website should cover. There’s more on this in how SEO and Google Ads work better together.
Our local garage door company case study shows the two running side by side: local SEO alongside a Google Ads account built around the company’s key products and areas. Twelve months on, the business was ranking in the top three locally for a wide range of keywords and was booked up 12 weeks in advance.
Little and often beats a one-off overhaul
A profile updated once a year, a website unchanged since launch and reviews that stopped arriving 18 months ago all send the same message to customers and to Google. You don’t need to tackle everything at once. Pick two or three of the areas above, give them a small amount of time each month and keep going.
If you’d like an outside view of how your business shows up across Google, your listings and your website, call us on 0330 223 0847 or send us a message and we’ll take a look.
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