Most advice on this subject starts with the website. Ours does not, because the website is usually not the problem. When a business is hard to find on Google, the cause is nearly always the listings: a Business Profile half filled in, the company name spelled two ways across the web, the hours never entered. That’s a listing problem, not a website problem, and a lot of it you can fix yourself with an afternoon and some patience. What follows is the order we work in with our own clients. Do it in this order and you will have done the part of local SEO that matters most before you have spent a dollar, and you will know whether the rest is worth paying anyone for.
Start in the edit view, not the search result#
Open your Google Business Profile signed in, in the edit view, not the public listing a customer sees. The edit view is the record; the listing is a rendering of it, and the two routinely disagree. Go through it field by field. Are the categories the work you actually want more of? Is the service area the towns you really cover? Are the hours entered at all, including the holiday hours nobody remembers exist? Google also sets some attributes on its own, so treat anything you do not remember entering as a change to review, not a mistake you must have made.
Agree one spelling, then use it everywhere#
Write down your business name, address, and phone number exactly one way, and then make every place that lists you match it, letter for letter. This sounds too small to matter. It is not. A name with and without the last word, a street abbreviated in one place and spelled out in another, a phone number in two formats: to the systems deciding which business shows in the map, that pattern looks like it might be more than one business, and your reputation gets split across the copies. Check each listing by hand against your one agreed spelling, starting with the profile and your own website.
Ask for reviews the same way, every time#
Ask on every completed job, through the same channel every time. A steady habit beats a burst of requests when work is slow, both because it looks like what it is, real customers reviewing real work, and because you never have to remember to catch up. Reply to what comes in, including the rough ones.
Then, and only then, the website#
Once the listings agree with each other, the website’s job is to back them up: a page for each service you want to be found for, written in the words a customer would type, with the markup that puts your hours and details in the search result itself. If you have read this far and would rather hand the whole thing over, this is exactly what our local search and business listings service does, and the audit that starts it costs nothing.