The Local Search Starter Kit

Before you start

This guide assumes you have a real, verified Google Business Profile and a website of some kind. It is written for a business that serves customers in a defined area: a trade, a clinic, a salon, a garage, a restaurant, a shop. It takes roughly eight hours of work spread over thirty days. Nothing in it requires paid software.

Work in the order given. The early steps are the ones Google reacts to fastest, and finishing them first means you see movement while you are still motivated to do the rest.

Week one: get the foundation honest

Step 1. Fix the name, address and phone number, everywhere

Write down your business name exactly as it appears on your signage and your invoices. Now check it matches, character for character, on your Google Business Profile, your website footer, your Facebook page, your Apple Business Connect listing, Yelp, and any trade directory you are listed in. Do not add keywords to the name field on Google. It is against the guidelines, it is a common reason for suspension, and the effect it once had is gone.

Inconsistency here is the single most common technical problem we find. Two versions of a phone number across five directories genuinely does suppress a profile.

Step 2. Categories

Pick one primary category that describes your main line of work as narrowly as is accurate. Emergency plumber beats plumber if that is your main trade. Then add secondary categories for the other things you genuinely do, up to about five. Adding categories you do not serve will bring you enquiries you have to decline, which costs you in reviews.

Step 3. Services, in full

This is the step that takes an evening and pays the most. List every service you will take money for. Under each one, write two or three sentences describing it: what is involved, roughly what it costs, how long it takes. Fifteen to thirty services is normal for a trade. If you have to think hard to reach fifteen, you are describing your work too broadly.

Week two: the website side

Step 4. One page per service

Your profile can only take you so far if the site behind it has one page saying we do plumbing. Create a page for each of your top three to five services. Each page needs a clear heading naming the service, a paragraph on what the job involves, a price range or an explanation of how you quote, and a phone number visible without scrolling on a phone.

Step 5. Embed your location signals properly

Put your full address and phone number in the site footer, in text rather than inside an image. Add a LocalBusiness structured data block to your homepage with the name, address, phone, opening hours and service area. If your website platform has an SEO section, this is often a field you can fill in rather than code you have to write.

Step 6. Speed and mobile

Run your site through Google PageSpeed Insights on mobile. If you score below fifty, the single most likely cause is uncompressed images. Resize every image so its longest edge is at most sixteen hundred pixels and export it as WebP. On most small business sites this one change moves the score more than everything else combined.

Week three: proof

Step 7. Build a review habit, not a review campaign

Get the short review link from your profile and put it in three places: an automatic text message sent when a job is marked complete, the footer of your emailed invoice, and a small card left with the customer. Then ask, out loud, at the moment the customer is happiest, which is usually the moment the work finishes and not three days later.

Aim for a steady trickle rather than a burst. Twenty reviews arriving in one week looks exactly like what it is. Two a week for a year is both more believable and more effective.

Step 8. Reply to every review, including the good ones

Replies are visible, they are indexed, and they demonstrate an active business. Keep them short and specific: mention the job, not your commitment to excellence. For a negative review, reply once, calmly, with the facts and an offer to fix it, then take the rest offline. The reply is not for the person who complained; it is for the two hundred people who will read it.

Week four: keep it alive

Step 9. Post, photograph and measure

Add photographs of real, finished work, geotagged by simply taking them on the phone at the job. Two or three a week is plenty. Use the posts feature for genuine things: a seasonal offer, a new service, holiday hours. An abandoned profile with the last photo from 2021 signals something to a customer, and probably to Google.

Then measure. In your profile, the performance tab gives you calls, direction requests and website clicks. Write down the current month's numbers before you start and compare after ninety days, not after two weeks.

What to expect, honestly

• Weeks 1 to 3: little visible change. The corrections are being processed.
• Weeks 4 to 8: movement in the map results for your less competitive services, and usually a rise in direction requests before calls.
• Months 3 to 6: the service pages start ranking, and calls from search become a countable channel rather than a guess.

If nothing at all has moved by month three, the most likely explanations are a duplicate profile competing with yours, a name and address inconsistency you have not found, or a genuinely saturated category where paid search is the faster route. All three are worth a second opinion before spending more time.