Local SEO basics: how trades get found on Google

If you're a plumber in Telford, you don't care about ranking in London. You care about the person three streets away typing 'emergency plumber near me' at 7am. That's local SEO, and the basics are very learnable.

Start with your Google Business Profile. It's free, and for local searches it often matters more than your website. Fill in every field, pick the right categories, add real photos, and — this is the big one — collect reviews consistently. Reviews are rocket fuel for the local map pack.

On the website itself, be explicit about where you work. A page per key town or service area, with genuine content (not the same paragraph with the place name swapped), tells Google exactly who to show you to.

Then the fundamentals: fast loading, works perfectly on a phone, clear contact details on every page, and a title on each page that says what you do and where. None of it is glamorous, but it compounds.

Local SEO isn't a one-off. It's a slow, steady drip — which is exactly why pairing it with a blog you actually update (like this one) beats a site that never changes.