Local SEO: the half that happens on your website

A client rang us a few months after we'd sorted out his Google Business Profile. "The Google thing worked, and then it stopped." He wasn't wrong. He'd gone from nowhere to sitting in the map pack for his own suburb inside about six weeks, the enquiries had lifted, and then the line went flat.

We had a look. The profile was still fine. He was ranking well where his shopfront was and essentially nowhere in the four suburbs around it, which happened to be where most of his work came from. And when I went through his website, it didn't mention a single one of those places. Not on the homepage, not on the service pages, not in the footer. As far as anything reading that site could tell, he could have been anywhere in the country.

That's the ceiling people hit. The profile gets you found where you're pinned on the map. Everything past that is your website's problem.

Google has to learn where you work from somewhere

Distance is one of the main things Google weighs up for a local search, and for a business with an address it mostly uses the address. Fair enough. But plenty of businesses aren't really at their address in any meaningful sense. The sparky's registered office is his garage. The mobile mechanic doesn't have a shopfront at all. If you serve an area rather than sit in one, your profile lets you list service areas instead of a shopfront, and that's worth setting properly.

The trouble is that your service areas are a claim you make about yourself. Your website is the corroboration. When the two agree, and your site has actual pages talking about actual work in those places, you've given Google a reason to believe you belong in a search two suburbs over. When your site is silent on the question, there's nothing to weigh.

Where suburb pages go wrong

Here's where a lot of people get burnt, usually by someone who sold them a package.

The tempting move is to generate forty pages, one per suburb in a fifty kilometre radius, each identical except for the place name swapped in. It looks like coverage. Google has a name for it, doorway pages, and it's been in the spam policies for years. Best case those pages do nothing. Worst case they drag on the rest of the site, and we've cleaned up a couple where that's exactly what happened.

A location page that earns its place has something on it that couldn't be copy-pasted to the next town. Jobs you've genuinely done there, with photos. The bit of local knowledge that only comes from working the area, whether that's the council's rules on a particular kind of approval, or which streets are a nightmare for parking a truck, or the type of housing stock and the problems that come with it. A note on how far out you'll travel. Reviews from people who live there.

That's a real page and you can only write so many of them, which is the real constraint. Four or five good ones beat forty thin ones, and it's a better use of an afternoon.

The unglamorous plumbing

A few things underneath make the rest work harder, and none of them are exciting.

Your business name, address and phone number should appear on the site exactly as they appear on the profile, character for character. "Street" on one and "St" on the other is the sort of mismatch that quietly costs you. Getting your details into the page markup helps too, using Google's local business structured data, which is just a machine-readable version of what's already on the page. And your location pages need to be linked to from somewhere real, usually the relevant service page, rather than floating in the sitemap where nobody ever visits them.

Then you wait. Local rankings move slowly and unevenly, and anyone promising you a fortnight is guessing. What we tend to see is the profile work landing first, and the on-site work catching up over a couple of months as Google works out that the pages are genuine.

If you're a trade, most of this sits on top of the basics we went through in what actually gets a tradie's phone ringing. And if you'd rather find out where your own site stands before committing to any of it, that's most of what we look at in an audit, which we'll do for free.