Blog / seo wednesday
Local SEO for service businesses: the checklist
A practical local SEO checklist for service businesses: Business Profile, consistent contact details, reviews, service pages, local proof.
This Wednesday's SEO instalment is for the plumbers, electricians, landscapers, accountants, and everyone else whose customers search with a city name attached. Local SEO is mostly not clever. It is a checklist, worked through once and then maintained. Here is ours.
Claim and finish your Google Business Profile
For "electrician near me" searches, the map pack above the regular results gets most of the clicks, and your Google Business Profile is what puts you in it. If you do only one thing from this article, do this.
Claim the profile, verify it, and then actually finish it: every service category that applies, real photos of your work and your people, accurate hours, service area, and a description written for customers rather than keywords. Google measurably favours complete profiles, and half-finished ones are the norm in most trades, so completeness alone is an edge.
Then keep it alive. Update holiday hours. Post the occasional photo. A profile that looks abandoned reads as a business that might be too.
One name, one address, one phone number
Google cross-references your business details everywhere they appear: your site, your profile, directories, social pages. Every mismatch ("Smith & Sons" here, "Smith and Sons Ltd." there, an old cell number in some directory) erodes its confidence that these are all the same business.
Pick one exact spelling of your name, address, and phone number, write it down, and use it identically everywhere. Put it in the footer of your website as text, not as an image. While you are standardizing, standardize the email too: replies from an address at your own domain look considerably more like an established business than a gmail address, and business email on your domain costs a few dollars a month.
This is tedious. It is also one of the few parts of local SEO where you can reach done.
Reviews: ask, and answer
Review count and rating are heavy inputs into map rankings, and the pattern we see is blunt: businesses that ask for reviews have reviews, and businesses that wait for them have four.
Build the ask into the end of every job. Google provides a short link to your review form on your profile; text it to the customer while the finished work is fresh. No incentives (that is against the rules and it shows), just a direct ask at the right moment.
Then reply to reviews, including the bad ones, briefly and professionally. Replies are read by every future customer who checks you out, and an owner who responds calmly to an unfair review often earns more trust than a wall of five stars.
A real page for each service
One "Services" page listing twelve trades in twelve bullet points cannot rank for any of them. A page has to be about a thing to rank for that thing.
Give each main service its own page: what the work involves, what affects the price, photos of actual jobs, the areas you cover, and answers to what customers genuinely ask. Then title it the way people search, which is the exercise from our titles and descriptions fix: "Furnace repair in Kamloops" beats "Our Services" every time.
A caution: do not mass-produce near-identical pages for thirty suburbs by swapping the town name. Google treats that as doorway spam. Write real pages for the two or three areas that matter, with details that could only be about that place.
Local proof, and a little markup
You do not need a blog full of filler to look local. You need evidence: job photos with a line of context, the neighbourhoods you actually work in, community sponsorships, membership in local associations. A June photo of a deck build says more about your service area than three hundred words of "we proudly serve" boilerplate.
Two technical finishers. Add LocalBusiness structured data matching your profile details exactly; we walked through it in structured data for small sites. And embed a map on your contact page so humans can find you too.
Work the list top to bottom and you will be ahead of most local competitors, because most never get past step one. If your website itself is the thing holding you back, talk to us and we will help you get the foundation sorted.