The technical checks behind local rankings, and how to measure them
You can have a perfect Google Business Profile and still not appear, because something underneath is stopping Google reading the site properly. This covers what to check, in what order, and how to tell whether any of it is working.
This is the second half of the job
The first half is your Google Business Profile, the pages you write for each area you serve, reviews, and getting your business details identical everywhere. That is where most of the gains are and it is covered in how local SEO works for UK service businesses. If you have not done that yet, start there instead.
This page is the part underneath: whether Google can reach your pages, read them, and understand what they are. It matters less often, but when it is wrong nothing else you do will work.
What to look at, in order
- Can Google reach your pages?Search Console, Pages report. It lists what is indexed, what is not, and why. Pages excluded by a stray noindex or a robots.txt rule are invisible no matter how good they are, and this is the single most common serious fault we find. Check this before anything else on the list.
- Does it work on a phone?Google indexes the mobile version of your site. If the mobile layout is broken or content is hidden on small screens, that is the version being judged. Open it on your own phone before trusting any tool.
- How fast is it?PageSpeed Insights, and pay attention to the field data rather than the lab score. Under about two and a half seconds for the main content to appear is a reasonable target. Speed is a ranking input rather than a penalty — a slow site is not punished, it just loses to a faster one that is otherwise equal, and it loses visitors who leave before it loads.
- Does the site say what it is?LocalBusiness schema in JSON-LD, giving your name, address, phone, opening hours and service area. It does not push you up the rankings by itself; it removes ambiguity about what your business is and where. Worth doing once, properly.
- Are your pages competing with each other?If you have several location or service pages covering similar ground, canonical tags tell Google which is the definitive version. Get this wrong in the other direction and you can remove pages from search entirely, so check what your existing canonicals say before adding any.
How to tell whether any of it is working
Most small businesses either measure nothing or measure the wrong thing. Rankings are the wrong thing on their own — they vary by device, by location, by who is searching, and a position that moves from nine to six changes almost nothing in practice.
Four numbers actually worth watching, in descending order of usefulness:
- Calls and enquiriesThe only one that pays for anything. Google Business Profile reports calls and direction requests directly. On your site, track form submissions and clicks on your phone number.
- Clicks in Search ConsoleNot impressions. Impressions are easy to make go up and mean nothing on their own. Clicks mean somebody chose you over the results either side.
- Which queries bring themSearch Console will show you the actual phrases. This is usually the most surprising report you will ever open, and it should change what you write next.
- Traffic by cityIn Analytics. If you serve three towns and one of them sends nothing, that is a page to work on rather than a mystery.
Set a baseline before you change anything, then leave it alone for a month. Checking weekly tells you nothing except how much search results fluctuate. Meaningful movement takes three to six months, longer in competitive sectors.
Worth adding Bing Webmaster Tools while you are at it. It takes five minutes, it is free, and Bing still carries a share of UK searches that is small but not nothing.
Four things local SEO is not
- Not a directory exerciseListings are part of it. They are not the point, and building your presence on somebody else’s platform builds their authority rather than yours.
- Not a one-offCompetitors publish, Google changes, your details go stale. A site optimised in 2023 and left alone is being overtaken right now.
- Not fastWeeks for anything to register, three to six months for it to show up in enquiries. Anyone promising the map pack in a fortnight is guessing or selling.
- Not a keyword exerciseWriting “hairdresser in Bristol” fifteen times has been counterproductive for over a decade. Clarity is the optimisation.
And be careful with £49-a-month packages. At that price nobody is doing any of the above; you are buying an automated report and some directory submissions. Our proposal checker will tell you what a quote is actually offering, and it will tell you at the top that we are an agency and to weigh our opinion of other agencies accordingly.
What the technical half contributes
Paramount Space Cleaning in Coventry came to us in October 2025 with no local visibility. The technical work was not the interesting part — indexing, speed, schema, making sure the pages could be read — but nothing else would have worked until it was done. In seven months they went from nothing to position one for “deep cleaning coventry”, page one for 55 search terms, and a £7,000 commercial contract traced back to organic search.
The caveat we attach to everything: one business, one city, one sector that is competitive but not brutal. Not a forecast for anyone else. Nora approved every figure before we published it.
Simon & Lisa Batchelor run Get Your Website Seen. Simon spent ten years as owner and editor of a magazine, then built and sold Commerce Computers Ltd, a trade computer supplier that traded online as shop4it.co.uk. So we have been on the buying side of marketing that did not work, which is most of why this site reads the way it does. You deal with us directly, and every figure published here belongs to a client who approved it.
Skip the checking, get the answer
The free audit runs all five checks above and tells you which one is actually your problem, plus what to fix first and what you can do yourself. Written by one of us, without a call first.
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