How to get your business found on Google locally

Someone within a few miles of you is typing “gardener near me” into their phone right now. Whether they find you or the firm two towns over comes down to a fairly small number of things, and most of them you can do yourself.

This is what actually matters, in the order I’d do it.

There are two sets of results, and they work differently

Search for a local service and you get two things on the page.

At the top there’s a map with two or three businesses under it. That’s the local pack, and it’s fed by Google Business Profiles. For a lot of service businesses it takes the majority of the clicks, because it’s first and because it has the phone number and reviews right there.

Below that are the ordinary blue links, fed by websites.

You want to be in both, and they’re won differently. The local pack is mostly your Google Business Profile plus proximity and reviews. The blue links are mostly your website. Working on one and ignoring the other is the most common mistake I see.

Start with your Google Business Profile

It’s free, it takes about an hour, and for most local businesses it’s the single highest-return thing on this list. Do it before you touch your website.

Claim and verify it. If you’ve never done this, there may already be an unverified listing for your business that you don’t control.

Pick the right primary category. This matters more than almost anything else on the profile. Be specific: “Landscaper” rather than “Contractor”. You can add secondary categories, but the primary one does most of the work.

Set your service area properly. If you travel to customers, list the areas you actually cover rather than every town within fifty miles. Overreaching doesn’t help you rank further away, and it brings in enquiries you’ll turn down.

Fill in every service you offer, with a real description for each. Most profiles have three services listed and a blank description. Yours shouldn’t.

Add real photos, and keep adding them. Photos of actual jobs, your van, your team. Not stock images.

Ask for reviews, properly. Not “please leave us a review” in an email footer. Ask at the moment someone tells you they’re pleased, send them the direct link, and make it take ten seconds. Then reply to every review you get, including the awkward ones. A calm, specific reply to a bad review reassures people more than a wall of five stars does.

Keep the basics identical everywhere. Your business name, address and phone number should match exactly across your website, your profile and any directory you’re listed on. Not “Ltd” in one place and “Limited” in another.

Then structure your website so it can rank

One page per service

A single page listing eight services will rank badly for all eight, because search engines match pages to searches and that page isn’t really about any one of them.

Give each meaningful service its own page with its own heading, its own description, its own photos and its own examples. If you do bin cleaning, jet washing and gutter clearing, that’s three pages, not three bullet points.

One page per area, but only if you mean it

Area pages work, and they’re also the easiest thing in local SEO to do badly.

A good area page says something true and specific about working in that place: the sort of properties you deal with, how you cover it, which jobs you’ve actually done there, what the parking or access is like. A bad area page is the same three paragraphs with the town name swapped out, repeated forty times. Search engines are good at spotting the second kind, and it can drag down the rest of your site with it.

The rule I’d give you: only make an area page if you can write something about that area you couldn’t write about anywhere else. If you can’t, put the towns you cover on one honest coverage page instead.

Write the words your customers use

You call it “grounds maintenance”. Your customers search for “garden clearance”. Write for how people actually search, not how the trade describes itself. Your Search Console data will tell you exactly which phrases people are already finding you with, which is a much better guide than guessing.

Answer real questions

The questions you get asked on the phone every week are the questions people type into Google before they call. Do you cover my postcode? How much is it roughly? Do I need to be in? How soon can you come? Put the answers on the site.

The technical bits that quietly matter

None of these are optional, and all of them are invisible until they bite.

Speed. Site speed is a ranking factor and, more importantly, a patience factor. Google’s rough target is main content visible within two and a half seconds on a phone.

Mobile. Google indexes the mobile version of your site. If your mobile site is a squashed version of the desktop one with things overlapping, that’s the version being judged.

Search Console. Set it up, verify, submit your sitemap. It’s free and it tells you what you’re ranking for, what’s broken and what Google can’t reach.

Structured data. Marking up your business details, services and FAQs in the background helps search engines understand what you are rather than guessing. It won’t rescue a thin site, but it’s a real advantage on a good one.

Titles that aren’t “Home”. Every page needs a title that says what the page is and where you work. It’s the blue line people click in the results.

What doesn’t work

Since it’ll get offered to you: buying links, stuffing town names into your footer, spinning out fifty near-identical area pages, and anyone who guarantees you the number one spot. Google decides rankings, so nobody honest can promise a position. Be wary of anyone who does.

How long it takes

Longer than people hope. The Google Business Profile work can show up within days to a few weeks. Website changes generally take weeks to months to settle, and building genuine authority is a matter of months rather than days.

That’s not a reason to skip it. It’s a reason to start now rather than in March, and to treat it as steady groundwork rather than a switch you flip.

The short version

If you only do three things: claim and properly fill in your Google Business Profile, split your services onto their own pages, and make the site fast on a phone. That’s most of the available win for most local businesses.

If you’d rather it was just handled, that’s what my local SEO work is, and it’s built into every site I put together rather than sold as an extra afterwards.