When someone searches for a business like yours in their local area, do you appear?
It sounds like a simple question, but local search involves more than having a website and hoping Google works out where you are.
Google uses information from your website, your Google Business Profile and other signals around the web to understand what your business does, where it operates and whether it is relevant to a local search.
For businesses that rely on customers within a particular town, county or service area, getting those signals right can make the difference between being found and being practically invisible.
What is local SEO?
Local SEO is the process of improving your online presence so that your business is more likely to appear when somebody searches for a relevant product or service in a particular location.
That might be an obvious search such as:
“Accountant in Worthing”
But increasingly, people don’t need to specify the location at all.
Someone standing in Worthing and searching for “accountant near me” or even simply “small business accountant” may see results influenced by where they are.
Those results aren’t limited to conventional website listings either. Local businesses can appear prominently within Google Maps, Business Profiles and other search features. Google specifically recommends claiming a Business Profile to manage how a local business appears across Search and Maps.
That means local SEO isn’t just about getting one page of your website to rank.
It’s about making your whole business easy to identify and understand.
Is your Google Business Profile doing its job?
For many local businesses, a Google Business Profile is one of their most valuable pieces of online property.
And it’s free.
Your profile can tell potential customers where you are, when you’re open, how to contact you, what you do and where to find your website. It can contain photographs, updates and customer reviews, and it can appear directly within both Google Search and Maps.
Yet I regularly find profiles that have been created and then largely forgotten.
Check yours.
Is the business category still correct? Are your opening hours accurate? Is the website address right? Are the photographs representative of the business today? Have services changed? Are there unanswered reviews?
Treat your Business Profile as an active part of your online presence rather than a listing you completed several years ago and haven’t looked at since.
Does your website make it clear where you work?
Don’t make search engines — or customers — play detective.
If location matters to your business, your website should make that clear naturally.
That doesn’t mean putting “plumber Worthing plumber Sussex plumber West Sussex” into every paragraph. Apart from being horrible to read, trying to manipulate search results by stuffing locations into copy isn’t a sensible long-term strategy.
Instead, provide genuinely useful information.
Where are you based? Which areas do you serve? Does distance affect delivery, appointments or pricing? Do you have different locations? Can customers visit you, or do you go to them?
If you have individual location pages, make them worthwhile. A page containing the same generic paragraph with a different town name inserted twenty times isn’t particularly useful to anyone.
Tell people something they actually need to know.
Are your business details consistent?
Your business exists in more places online than you might realise.
Directory listings, social profiles, professional memberships, old websites, local organisations, and industry platforms may contain information about you.
If one says you’ve moved, another has your old telephone number and a third uses a business name you stopped trading under six years ago, you are creating unnecessary confusion.
You don’t need to spend your life hunting down every obscure directory that has ever mentioned you.
But the important places should agree about the fundamentals of who you are and how customers can reach you.
And if your business changes address, telephone number, website or trading name, remember that updating your own website is only the beginning.
Do reviews matter for local visibility?
Reviews matter enormously to people.
When several similar businesses appear together, ratings, recent reviews and the way a business responds to its customers can strongly influence which one somebody investigates.
They also give potential customers information that your own marketing can’t provide.
A business telling you it offers fantastic service is advertising.
Customers repeatedly saying they received fantastic service is evidence.
Make asking for reviews part of your normal customer process rather than something you remember twice a year when business is quiet.
And respond to them.
That includes negative reviews. A calm, useful response to a reasonable complaint can sometimes tell a prospective customer more about a business than another five-star review.
Is your website connected to your local reputation?
Local marketing shouldn’t exist in separate boxes.
Your website, Business Profile, social media, local PR, directories, partnerships, sponsorships and real-world activity can reinforce one another.
If you sponsor the local football club, win an award, support a community event, work with another local organisation or receive coverage from a reputable local publication, don’t assume these things have nothing to do with your digital presence.
They help establish who your business is and where it belongs.
They may also generate relevant links and mentions from other websites — something that can strengthen the authority and visibility of your own site.
This is one reason I see SEO as much more than changing keywords in a website.
Sometimes the best SEO opportunity happens away from the website altogether.
What should you do about multiple locations or service areas?
This needs a little thought.
If you genuinely operate from several locations, each may warrant its own useful information and online presence.
Similarly, a business that travels to customers across a defined service area should make that coverage easy to understand.
What I wouldn’t recommend is creating dozens of near-identical pages simply because you want to appear for every town within 30 miles.
A useful page about a location should exist because there is something useful to tell a customer about providing your service there.
Start with the customer. The SEO usually becomes much more sensible as a result.
Don’t forget the technical details
There are also things happening behind the scenes.
Your website should be crawlable, mobile-friendly and structured so search engines can understand important information.
Appropriate structured data can explicitly provide Google with details about a local business, including its address, opening hours and other information.
Your website should also be connected to Google Search Console so you can see how Google is finding and displaying it. Google itself recommends Search Console as part of establishing an official business presence online.
None of this replaces good content or a properly maintained Business Profile.
It supports them.
Local SEO is really about being clear
There isn’t one magic local SEO setting that suddenly puts a business at the top of Google Maps.
- The strongest local presence comes from lots of things agreeing with one another.
- Your website says clearly what you do and where you work.
- Your Google Business Profile is complete and current.
- Your contact information is consistent.
- Customers are talking about you.
- Other relevant organisations know you exist.
- Your website contains useful information and is technically easy for search engines to understand.
Taken together, those signals create a much clearer picture of your business.
And ultimately, that’s what good local SEO should achieve:
When somebody nearby needs what you do, make it as easy as possible for them to find you.