The local SEO guide for UK businesses

Local search results are built differently to ordinary ones. Understanding that difference is what separates a campaign that produces phone calls from one that produces a nice looking traffic graph.

The map pack and how it is ranked

The block of three businesses with a map, sitting above the ordinary results, is the map pack. It is ranked on three factors Google names openly:

1. Relevance. How well your profile and site match what was searched, including your categories and services.
2. Distance. How close you are to the searcher, or to the place named in the search.
3. Prominence. How well known and well regarded you are, drawn from reviews, links, citations and your website.

Distance is the constraint most businesses underestimate. A plumber in Bedminster will struggle to appear for searches made in Filton however good their SEO is, because the searcher is simply nearer to somebody else. That is not a failure of the campaign, it is how the system works, and it should shape where you expect to win.

Your Google Business Profile

This is the highest return work available to a local business and it is free. A profile that is complete, accurate and actively maintained routinely outranks a better website with a neglected profile. The full detail is in the Google Business Profile guide, but the essentials are:

• The right primary category, and secondary categories for everything else you do.
• Accurate hours, including holidays and any out of hours service.
• Real photographs, added regularly rather than once at setup.
• Every service listed individually, using the words customers use.
• The Q&A section populated rather than left to strangers.

Reviews

Reviews affect prominence directly and click through rate enormously. Volume, recency and rating all count, and so does whether you reply. A steady trickle is worth far more than a burst of twenty in one week, which looks exactly like what it usually is.

Ask every satisfied customer, at the moment they are most pleased, and make it one tap. Reviews and SEO covers how to do that within the rules, including what you must not do.

Citations and consistency

Your name, address and phone number should be identical everywhere they appear: your site, your profile, the major UK directories, your trade body listings and your social profiles. Inconsistency creates doubt, and doubt costs prominence. This is a one off tidy up, not a monthly service, whatever a low cost package suggests. See why cheap SEO usually costs more.

What the website still has to do

• A page per service, not one page listing everything. See on page SEO basics.
• Your address and phone number in the footer of every page, as real text.
• A clear service area, named honestly. Listing sixty places you do not really cover helps nobody.
• Fast on mobile, because local searches are overwhelmingly made on phones.
• Structured data describing the business, covered in technical SEO explained.

Location pages, done properly

A page for each area you genuinely serve can work very well. It fails when the pages are the same paragraph with the place name swapped, which Google identifies easily and which reads badly to anyone who lands on two of them.

A location page earns its place when it contains something true only about that place: work you have done there, the streets or landmarks you know, parking or access notes, response times, local partners. If you cannot write three specific sentences about an area, do not build a page for it.

You can see the pattern applied on this site across Bristol areas, from SEO Clifton to SEO Portishead, where each page lists the agencies that genuinely cover that area rather than repeating a template.

The order to do all this in

Most businesses can do the first three themselves in a fortnight. If you would rather not, local SEO Bristol lists agencies with the specialism, and you can request quotes to see what it costs for your sector.