Local SEO: being found by people who are nearby and ready

Local SEO is the work of being found in searches where the person is looking for something near them — a plumber, a dentist, a supplier in the same city. It behaves differently from general search optimisation because the results are dominated by a map with a handful of listings, and getting into that handful depends on factors that are unusually within your control.

That is the good news and the reason this is worth an afternoon rather than a retainer. Three things carry most of the outcome: a complete and accurate business listing, the same details everywhere they appear, and a steady supply of reviews. Everything else is refinement.

The three that matter

• A complete business listing on the major map services. Complete means every field — categories, hours including holidays, service area, description, photographs, and the products or services list. Half-filled listings lose to fully filled ones with worse businesses behind them.
• Consistency of name, address and phone number across every place they appear: your site, directories, social profiles, old listings you forgot. Conflicting details are a common and entirely fixable drag.
• Reviews, recent and answered. Volume matters, recency matters more than people expect, and replying to the negative ones publicly and without argument matters most of all.

What to do on the site itself

1. Put the address and phone number in the page text, not only in an image or a footer graphic.
2. Give each location its own page if you have more than one, with genuinely different content rather than the same paragraph with the town swapped.
3. Name the areas you actually serve, in the words locals use, including the neighbouring places people search from.
4. Add local business structured data so search engines can read the address, hours and geography without inferring them.
5. Make the site fast on a phone. Local searches are overwhelmingly mobile and often on a poor connection.
6. Answer the local questions — parking, access, opening on public holidays — because these are what people actually search before visiting.

Asking for reviews is the highest-return activity in local search and the one most businesses do not systematise. A short message sent the day after the work, with a direct link, from the person who did the job, produces reviews at a rate that no amount of optimisation matches. Never buy them: platforms detect purchased reviews, and the penalty is worse than having few.

What not to bother with

Bulk directory submissions to hundreds of low-quality sites are a service sold to small businesses and mostly a waste — a handful of significant directories in your country or trade covers it. Keyword-stuffing your business name in a listing violates most platforms' terms and gets listings suspended. And paying for a monthly local SEO retainer before you have completed the listing, fixed the details and asked thirty customers for reviews is buying refinement before the fundamentals. Whether to hire at all is the wider question in web design for small business.

Where we fit

Ettex Sites is where the site side happens — location pages, structured details, the contact information in real text — and the pages themselves are covered in website builder. Review requests sent after a job fit naturally with Ettex Mail, and the customer records behind them in Ettex CRM.

To be direct: we do not manage your map listings, do not submit to directories, do not monitor rankings and do not aggregate reviews. Those are separate services, some worth paying for and most not. What we provide is the site half, which is one of the three things that matter and the only one we can honestly influence.