Local SEO

Get found in the three results your customers actually tap

For HVAC, cleaning, plumbing, dental and any business with a van or a front door. The goal is the map pack and the phone ringing from the right postcodes.

Get a free local audit See local results
Map pack movement in 8 to 12 weeks
Profile, citations and area pages
Calls tracked by service area
A quiet local high street of independent shops under a blue sky
The problem

You rank for your business name. You do not rank for the job.

Almost every local business I audit is already number one for its own name. That is not traffic, that is people who already knew you. The work is ranking for the thing someone types when they do not know you yet.

Phone showing a map of nearby businesses with ratings
01

You are not in the map pack

Three results sit above everything else on a local search, and most people never scroll past them. If your profile is thin or your categories are wrong, you are not in that box.

How I fix it
White service van parked on a leafy suburban street
02

One page for forty suburbs

A single Areas We Serve page with a list of suburb names does not rank for any of them. Each area you actually want work from needs a page that says something true about that area.

How I fix it
Customer smiling at a shop counter while paying on a tablet
03

Reviews arrive in bursts

Nine reviews in one week then nothing for eight months reads as a campaign. A steady trickle with replies is worth more than a pile of five stars from last year.

How I fix it
212% More calls from Google Business Profile for a regional HVAC company in 7 months
61 Local terms moved into the top 3 across nine service areas
34 City and suburb pages built for a commercial cleaning client
8 to 12 Weeks before map pack movement usually shows up in the data

Figures come from client accounts between 2023 and 2026. Local results depend on how many businesses you are competing with in each area.

Google Business Profile

The profile is the product page for your map listing

Most profiles I inherit were filled in once, years ago, by whoever set up the phone line. The category is wrong, half the services are missing and the last photo is from a different van.

Primary and secondary categories chosen against what actually ranks locally
Every service listed, described and priced where it helps
Photo cadence so the listing looks alive rather than abandoned
Questions seeded and answered before a competitor answers them for you
Ask about a profile audit
Laptop on a clean white desk beside a green plant
Service area pages

Pages that could only have been written about that suburb

The test I use is simple. If I can swap the suburb name for another one and the page still reads fine, the page is worthless. Google has been able to spot that for years and so can your customers.

One page per area you genuinely serve, not per postcode on a map
Real detail: the jobs you take there, travel time, what it usually costs
Internal links so the pages support each other instead of competing
Schema and embedded directions that match the profile exactly
Shop owner serving a customer at a bright counter
How we work

The first 90 days of a local engagement

STEP 01

Audit the profile

Categories, services, hours, photos, products and the questions people have already asked. I screen record the whole thing so you can see what I see.

STEP 02

Fix the basics

Name, address and phone made consistent everywhere it matters, duplicate listings merged, and the profile filled out properly rather than half filled.

STEP 03

Build the pages

Real service area pages with local detail, pricing context and the jobs you actually take in that area. Published on a schedule you approve.

STEP 04

Keep it moving

Review requests going out on a rhythm, posts and photos added monthly, and a report that shows calls and direction requests by area.

We were invisible two suburbs over and had no idea. Camille rebuilt the profile, wrote nine proper area pages, and the calls started coming from postcodes we had never heard from before.

Dan Reyes

Owner, Northside Heating and Cooling

Local SEO questions I get asked

As many as you can write honestly about. Ranking follows real proximity and real relevance, so a business with one van covering forty suburbs will win the nearest ten and struggle with the rest. I would rather build ten pages that work than forty that do not.

You need a real place of business, but it can be hidden. Service area businesses can hide the address and still rank, as long as the area you claim matches where you actually work. Renting a mailbox in a suburb you never visit gets the listing suspended.

That comes first, before anything else. Usually it is a category, an address or a name that does not match the signage. Reinstatement takes a documented appeal and somewhere between a week and a month.

Local SEO is the map pack, the profile and the area pages. General SEO is everything else on the site. Most service businesses need both, but local is where the phone starts ringing first, so it usually goes first.

Want to know which suburbs you are losing?

Send me your site and the areas you cover. I will record a 10 minute walkthrough of where you show up, where you do not, and what I would fix first.

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