A story I keep seeing: a local business — a practice, a trade, a small firm — has a website. Looks decent. Works technically. And still doesn't show up on Google when someone nearby searches for exactly what they offer. Instead, review sites, big directories, and the competitor next door rank.

That's not bad luck. It's local SEO that hasn't happened. And the good news: local SEO is one of the few disciplines where small businesses with small budgets can win against bigger ones — if they know what matters.

Most of it happens in your Google Business Profile

Most people, when they hear "local SEO", think first about their website. Wrong. The biggest lever is your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business). That's the box that appears on the right of search results when someone searches for a business or a local service.

Why it matters so much: for many local searches, the profile sits above the normal search results. You can have the most beautiful website in the world — if your business profile is missing or poorly maintained, nobody sees you.

What actually counts:

  • Fill it in completely. All services, opening hours, anything that fits. Gaps look careless.
  • Get the category right. The primary category massively determines which searches you appear in. "Carpenter" is better than "tradesperson"; "custom furniture maker" is better than "carpenter".
  • Photos, regularly. Newer Google data shows profiles with current photos get clicked noticeably more often. Once a month, take three or four shots of work in progress and upload them.
  • Make posts. Google Business Profile has a posts feature — offers, news, events. Most people don't use it. Whoever does stands out.
  • Reply to reviews. All of them. Especially the bad ones, above all the bad ones.

If you've got one hour a week for local SEO, spend it here. The rest is optional.

Reviews — the thing nobody likes to ask for

Here's the uncomfortable truth: reviews are probably the second most important factor in local SEO. And almost nobody asks for them actively.

I get why. It feels pushy. You don't want to beg. You don't want to be the person who, after sending the invoice, adds "and don't forget the five stars". But the reality is: happy customers rarely write reviews on their own. Unhappy ones do. And so the picture gets distorted.

What works, from working with clients:

  • Ask right after completion. Not three weeks later by email. Directly, on the phone or in person, while the satisfaction is fresh.
  • Have a link ready. The effort for the customer has to be minimal. A QR code on the invoice, a short link by SMS, no long form.
  • Not all at once. Google gets suspicious when a business that never had reviews suddenly gets fifteen in a week. One or two a week is ideal.
  • Respond. To every review, within a few days. It shows not just the customer but also Google that the profile is actively maintained.

And yes: when a bad review lands, it's not the end of the world. A professional, friendly response to it often reads more convincingly than ten smooth five-star reviews.

Your website's job in local SEO

Your Google Business Profile gets people to the search results page. Your website has to convince them afterwards. For that, you need a few things on the site, above all:

Local terms, used naturally. Not "electrician London electrical contractor London emergency London" as a keyword sausage. But: "electrical installation in Kreuzberg and the surrounding area", worked into a normal sentence. Google is good at telling real text from stuffed text.

A separate page per location and per service. If you work in three districts and offer five services, that's fifteen possible search intents. Don't cram everything onto one page. Make each service its own sub-page, and mention where you work on it. That's more content, but it has a job.

Structured data. This is the more technical bit. With schema markup, you tell Google in code: "I'm an electrical business, here's my address, these are my hours, this is my service area." I build this into every project, but it's nothing you need to do manually — ask your developer about it.

Clean code and fast load times. Since Google rolled out Mobile-First Indexing, the mobile version of your website is the one Google judges. Anyone building like it's 2015 is losing.

Directories and citations — diminishing returns, but not zero

A few years ago, the advice was: list yourself in a hundred directories and you'll rank locally. That's no longer true. Google has learned to spot spam directories.

What still counts: the big, established directories (Yellow Pages, industry-specific portals) and consistent NAP data everywhere. NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone. If your address is written one way on your website, another way on Google, and a third way in a directory, it confuses Google, and your ranking suffers.

The solution is unsexy: record all your data once, enter it identically everywhere, and check it now and then to make sure it's still correct. No SEO magic. Homework.

Backlinks (links from other websites to yours) are still one of the most important ranking factors. For small local businesses they're hard to get — you can't just buy them, and you shouldn't.

What works is slow and honest:

  • Local clubs and associations. If you're a member of a trade body, on the committee of the sports club, or in the volunteer fire service: ask for a link on the relevant website. That's a local, topically relevant backlink. Better than a hundred bought ones.
  • Partnerships. If you work with other local businesses (carpenter + roofer, lawyer + accountant), link to each other.
  • Local press. If you do something worth mentioning — sponsorship, an event, an unusual project — write to the local paper. An article with a link is worth gold.
  • Suppliers and partners. Who supplies you? Some have partner pages where they link to customers.

Forget link-swapping on big link platforms — "I'll link to you, you link to me". Google spots it, and it can hurt you more than help.

Mobile, because that's where local search happens

I mentioned this in the post on websites for tradespeople, but it belongs here too: most local searches happen on a phone. On the way to a customer, in the car (as a passenger, hopefully), at the weekend quickly from the sofa.

Your site has to load fast on a phone, be readable, and have a tap-to-call button. Your address should be linked to Google Maps. Opening hours should be clearly visible. These are basics, but I see websites every week where this isn't right.

How to tell if it's working

Local SEO isn't a switch you flip. It's a process. Three to six months realistically before changes visibly take effect.

What you can measure, for free:

  • Google Search Console shows you which search queries your website appears for and how often it gets clicked.
  • The insights in your Google Business Profile show searches, calls, direction requests, clicks through to your website.
  • The number and development of your reviews — easy to track qualitatively.

What I can't recommend is staring at a single keyword and checking every day whether you're at position 4 or position 6. It drives you mad and says nothing about the overall picture. Better to look at trends once every four weeks.

Local SEO isn't a one-off action. It's a habit. Maintain your profile, gather reviews, refresh content now and then. Anyone who does that is, in a year, ahead of competitors who don't.