Local SEO services that help nearby customers find you

Search for 'gardener near me' or 'dentist in Harrogate' and Google usually shows a map with a few local businesses above the normal results. Local SEO services are about getting you into that map and into the results below it, for the towns you actually work in.

Google says local results are based mainly on three things: relevance, distance and prominence. You can read it in Google's own guidance (opens in a new tab). Relevance is how well your profile and website match the search. Distance is how far you are from the person searching, which you can't change. Prominence is how well known and well reviewed you are.

So local SEO is mostly about the two you can influence: saying clearly what you do and where, and building a genuine reputation that Google can see.

If you work across several towns, a page for each one can help you appear in searches there, especially where you're too far away to show in the map. But only if each page is genuinely useful. Google's spam policies treat near-identical pages with the town name swapped as doorway pages, and they can do more harm than good.

A useful area page says something specific: the jobs you've done there, how quickly you can usually get there, parking or access quirks, and reviews from customers in that area. That's how Pro area pages are written, which is also why there are a limited number of them.

Nobody can honestly promise you the top spot on Google, and I won't. Local SEO improves your chances. Results typically build over weeks and months rather than days, and they depend on how many competitors are near you and how established they are.

The biggest lever after setup is usually in your hands: asking every customer for a review, replying to the reviews you get and keeping your hours and photos current. I set it up so that takes a couple of minutes a week, not an evening.