Local SEO Checklist for Small Businesses: 20 Steps to Get Found

When someone searches “plumber near me” or “accountant in Pontypridd”, Google usually shows a map with a few businesses before the normal results. Getting into that map, and into the listings underneath, is what local SEO is about. This checklist covers what to do, in roughly the order we’d tackle it for a small business.

Google says its local results are mainly based on three things: relevance (how well your business matches the search), distance (how far you are from the searcher, or from the place they typed) and how well known your business is, which takes in your reviews and how widely you’re mentioned and linked to online. You can’t change distance, but everything below helps with the other two.

Google Business Profile

1. Claim and verify your profile. Search for your business on Google. If a profile already exists, claim it; if not, create one. Google will ask you to verify that you own the business before it goes live.
2. Choose the right primary category. It’s one of the strongest signals you control. Pick the most specific category for your main service, then add secondary categories for the rest.
3. Use your real business name. Adding keywords or town names to it breaks Google’s guidelines and can get your profile suspended.
4. Fill in every section. Services, service areas, opening hours, phone number, website and a description that says what you do and where. If customers don’t come to you, set it up as a service-area business and hide your address.
5. Add real photos, and keep adding them. Your work, your team, your vehicles or your premises. Profiles with recent photos look active and tend to get more clicks.
6. Post updates. A short post every week or two about a recent job, an offer or some news keeps the profile fresh.

Reviews

7. Ask every happy customer for a review. Send your review link by text, WhatsApp or email straight after the job, while they’re pleased. A steady trickle is better than a burst once a year.
8. Reply to every review, good and bad. A calm, helpful reply to a bad review often reassures future customers more than the review puts them off.
9. Never buy reviews or offer rewards for them. Both break Google’s rules, and since April 2025 fake reviews have been illegal under UK consumer law.

Your website

10. Show your business name, area and phone number clearly, in the footer or on the contact page, matching your Google profile exactly.
11. Give each main service its own page. A page about boiler servicing in Cardiff can rank for that search. One page listing ten services rarely ranks for any of them.
12. Only create area pages for places you really serve, and make each one useful: jobs you’ve done there, how you work in that area, reviews from local customers. Pages copied with only the town name swapped can be treated as doorway pages, which Google’s spam policies warn against.
13. Write page titles that say what you do and where. “Boiler Servicing in Cardiff | Smith Heating” tells Google and searchers far more than “Home”.
14. Make it quick and easy to use on a phone. Many local searches come from someone on their phone who wants to call now, so fast pages, a tap-to-call number and a WhatsApp button all help.
15. Add LocalBusiness structured data. A small piece of code that gives Google your business name, area, phone number and opening hours in a format it reads directly. Most SEO plugins can add it for you.

Around the web

16. List your business on the main directories: Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Yell, Facebook, and any directory or trade body for your industry. Use exactly the same name, phone number and address details everywhere.
17. Earn a few local links. Local news coverage, sponsoring a local club or event, your chamber of commerce, suppliers and partners you work with. A handful of genuine local links is worth more than hundreds of random directory listings.

Tracking

18. Set up Google Search Console and Google Analytics, and track calls and form enquiries as key events so you can see what SEO brings in.
19. Check your Business Profile performance every month: searches, views, calls, website clicks and requests for directions.
20. Review and adjust. Look at which searches and pages bring enquiries, and do more of what works.

Where to start

Not showing up in Google at all? Start with why your website might not be appearing. Wondering when you’ll see results? Here’s how long SEO takes.