Most small businesses I speak to think being found on Google is about the website. It is mostly not. For a local business the website is perhaps a third of it, and the two thirds people ignore are free.
Here is what actually decides whether someone in the next town finds you.
The map results are the real prize
Search for almost any local trade and look at what is at the top. It is not websites. It is a map with three businesses on it.
Most people ring one of those three and never scroll further. Being fourth is close to being invisible, and being on that map has almost nothing to do with your website.
It comes from your Google Business Profile, which is free, takes an afternoon, and is the single highest return thing a local business can do. If you have not claimed yours, stop reading and go and do that instead.
The three things that move the map
Your category. The primary category decides which searches you can appear in at all. Not how high you rank, whether you are eligible. Get this wrong and nothing else matters. Pick the one that describes what you mostly do, not the widest one you can find.
Reviews. More than anything else. Not just the score, the number and how recent they are. Five reviews from this year beats twenty from four years ago.
Ask people. In person, at the end of a job, when they are pleased with you. Most will say yes and then forget, so send the direct link afterwards. This feels awkward the first few times and then it does not.
Distance. Google shows people what is near them, and you cannot argue with it. Which is why a business covering two areas needs a profile for each, and why one profile in the wrong place quietly costs you a whole town.
What the website part actually needs
Assuming the profile is sorted, the site needs to do four things. Not forty.
Say where you are, in words, on the page. Not just in the footer. If you cover Chippenham, the word Chippenham needs to appear somewhere a human would naturally read it. Google cannot infer your patch from your postcode alone.
Have a page per thing you do. One page listing eight services will lose to eight pages, every time. A page can only really be about one thing.
Load quickly on a phone. Most people searching for a local trade are on a phone, often outdoors, often on a poor signal. Enormous photographs straight off a camera are the usual culprit.
Make the phone number tappable. Obvious, and missing from a surprising number of sites. If someone has to write it down, you have lost a proportion of them.
What is a waste of your money
Being honest about the things people sell to small businesses.
Directory listings, paid. The free ones are fine. Paying monthly to be listed on sites nobody visits does nothing.
Anyone guaranteeing first place. Nobody can. Google does not sell it and does not tell anyone exactly how it decides. A guarantee is a sign to walk away.
Blogging for its own sake. Writing twelve posts nobody wanted to read does not help. One genuinely useful page answering a real question is worth more than a year of filler.
The thing that takes longest
Other websites linking to yours still matters a great deal, and there is no trick to it. For a local business the ones worth having are ordinary and slow:
- Your trade body or professional register
- Suppliers who list who they work with
- The local chamber of commerce
- Anyone you already work with regularly who has a website
- Local news, if you ever do anything worth a paragraph
Five of those, earned honestly, will do more than any package sold to you by email.
How to know whether it is working
Not by googling yourself. Your own browser knows you and flatters you, and you will see results no stranger sees.
Use Google Search Console. It is free, it takes ten minutes to set up, and it shows you the actual words real people typed before they found you. Watch whether the number of times you appear is climbing. That moves weeks before anything else does.
Then read the list of search terms properly. There will be phrases in there you never thought of, and those are what to write your next page about. That is worth more than any advice I can give you in the abstract, because it is about your business rather than businesses in general.
If you want a hand with any of it, give me a ring. And if all you do is claim your Business Profile and ask five customers for a review, you will have done the majority of it.