Local SEO guide for UK businesses

How local search works

When someone searches "electrician near me" or "cafés in Ludlow", Google usually shows a map with a handful of businesses, followed by ordinary web results. Local SEO covers both.

Google says local results are based mainly on three things in its help page on improving your local ranking:

• Relevance. How well your listing matches the search.
• Distance. How far you are from the searcher, or from the place they named.
• Prominence. How well known you are, drawing on reviews, links, articles and directory listings.

You can't move your premises, so distance is mostly fixed. Relevance and prominence are where the work goes.

Step 1: Get your Business Profile right

Your Google Business Profile is the listing that appears in the map. It's free, and for most local businesses it's the single most important piece of local SEO.

• Choose the most accurate primary category. "Plumber" and "Heating contractor" lead to different searches.
• Add your opening hours, including bank holiday changes.
• Write a plain description of what you do and where.
• Upload real photos of your premises, team and work.
• If you visit customers rather than having them visit you, set a service area and hide your address, as Google's guidelines for representing your business require.

Our Business Profile checklist covers each field in more detail.

Step 2: Make your website clearly local

Your website should back up your profile. That means:

• Your business name, address (if customers visit) and phone number on every page, usually in the footer.
• Service pages that mention the areas you actually cover.
• A contact page with a map or clear directions if people visit you.
• Pages for specific towns only where you've something genuinely different to say about working there. Our guide to local landing pages explains how to avoid doorway pages.

Step 3: Earn reviews steadily

Reviews affect both prominence and whether people choose you. Ask every happy customer, make it easy with a direct link and reply to reviews, including the critical ones.

Don't buy reviews, write them yourself or offer rewards only for positive ones. Since April 2025, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act has banned fake reviews in the UK, and the CMA has guidance for businesses on what's allowed.

Step 4: Be consistent elsewhere

Your name, address and phone number should match across the places people look you up: trade body registers, industry directories, your local council's business directory if it has one, and well-known sites such as Yell or Thomson Local. Mismatched details confuse customers and make it harder for search engines to be sure which business is which.

Prioritise directories your customers actually use. For a solicitor that's the SRA register and the Law Society's Find a Solicitor. For a gas engineer it's the Gas Safe Register. A hundred low-quality directory listings won't beat a handful of relevant ones.

Step 5: Be part of your community

Prominence grows from being known. Sponsoring a local team, speaking at a business breakfast, supporting a charity event or getting a mention in the local paper can all lead to links and searches for your name. They're good for business anyway.

Checking how you're doing

Rankings in local search vary from street to street, so checking from your own office tells you little. Better measures:

• Business Profile performance. Calls, direction requests and website clicks from your listing.
• Search Console. Searches that include your town or "near me", and clicks to your service pages.
• Enquiries. Ask new customers how they found you and keep a simple tally.

Common mistakes

• Using a virtual office or PO box as your address. Google's guidelines don't allow it for the map listing.
• Stuffing keywords into your business name on the profile, such as "Smith Plumbing Best Plumber Leeds". That breaks the guidelines and can get the listing suspended.
• Creating near-identical pages for fifty towns you don't really serve.
• Letting the profile go stale. Old hours and photos send people elsewhere.

Questions we hear

Why local search matters for so many UK firms

The Office for National Statistics counted 2.79 million UK businesses as of March 2026, and it said every UK region saw an increase that year. Around 553,000 of those businesses, about 19.8% of the UK total, were in London. Most of the rest serve a town, a county or a region, which is why a complete Google Business Profile and clear service-area pages matter more than a national slogan.

Google publishes guidelines for representing your business on Google. The practical test is simple: the name, address, categories, hours and service area on your profile should match the website, and they should describe the business you actually run. For a view of how Google is already treating your pages, use Search Console, which is free. You can also run the free SEO check on a key page, and see how ongoing work is priced on pricing.