Getting started with local SEO
This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. A short on-ramp to local SEO for teams who have not touched it before.
Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.
The reason this keeps coming up
Consistent name, address, and phone details across the web matter. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Local intent searches convert far better than national ones
- Change one thing and measure it
Reviews influence both ranking and the decision to call. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
The short version
Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Three things worth confirming about local SEO before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Consistent name, address, and phone details across the web matter — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.