Local SEO Services

For most local businesses the Business Profile drives more enquiries than the website does. It is also the asset most commonly left half-configured — a category chosen at random three years ago, no services listed, four photographs, and no posts since launch.

Optimisation work covers primary and secondary category selection (the single highest-leverage field, and the one most often wrong), full service and product listings, attribute completion, opening hours including bank holidays, service area definition, photograph cadence, and Q&A seeding. We also monitor for unauthorised edits, which are more common than most owners realise and can quietly change your category or address.

Your name, address and phone number need to match across every place they appear. In practice, established UK businesses carry a decade of drift: an old address on Yell, a previous phone number on Thomson Local, a slightly different trading name on a trade directory, a suite number present in some listings and absent in others.

Each inconsistency is a small confidence penalty. Collectively they suppress local pack performance in a way that is invisible unless you go looking. We audit the UK citation landscape — Google, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Yell, Thomson Local, Scoot, Cylex, sector directories and trade bodies — then correct and standardise, and document the format so it stays consistent.

Reviews influence both ranking and conversion, and the two respond to different things. Ranking responds to volume and recency. Conversion responds to rating, review content and how you reply to criticism.

Velocity matters more than total count. Forty reviews earned steadily over two years outperforms forty earned in one month and none since — and the latter pattern can trigger filtering. We set up a request process that fits how you actually deliver work, so reviews arrive continuously rather than in campaigns, and we handle response templates for both positive and negative feedback.

We do not buy, incentivise or write reviews. Beyond being against platform policy, filtered or removed reviews cost more than they ever gained.

The standard local SEO play is a page per town with the town name swapped in. Google has classified that as a doorway page pattern for over a decade, and it does not work — it dilutes internal link equity, creates near-duplicate clusters, and increasingly triggers demotion.

A local page earns its place when it contains something true only of that location: the districts you actually cover, the sectors that dominate that local economy, the specific competitive landscape, work you have done there, and questions local customers actually ask. If you cannot write three genuinely location-specific paragraphs, the location does not warrant its own page and the intent is better served from a section of the main service page.

We build fewer local pages than most agencies propose, and each one is written rather than generated.

Businesses with several branches and businesses that travel to customers need different treatment, and conflating them is a common and expensive error.

Multi-location businesses need one profile per staffed location, each with its own landing page, its own local content and its own review stream, plus a location index page and consistent schema across all of them. Service-area businesses should hide their address, define the service area accurately, and accept that ranking is anchored to the registered location whatever the service area says. Overstating the service area does not extend reach — it just makes the profile less relevant everywhere.