Five local SEO fixes you can do in an hour
No tools to buy, no agency to hire, nothing here that needs a developer. Five jobs, sixty minutes, and you can do them today with a cup of tea.
1. Finish your Google Business Profile
For most local searches this is the only thing a customer looks at before deciding who to ring, and it is free. Most profiles are half done.
- Write a real descriptionPlain sentences about what you do and where. Not a keyword list.
- Set the right categoriesPrimary and secondary. This is what Google matches searches against, so it matters more than anything else on the profile.
- Add current photographsReal jobs, the van, the team. Not a logo.
- Fill in hours and contact detailsIncluding bank holidays, which almost nobody sets.
- Turn on messaging and booking linksIf they apply to how you work.
Post an update while you are in there. It takes a minute and shows the profile is being maintained.
2. Make your business details match everywhere
Name, address and phone number should be the same on your website, your Google profile, your social accounts and every directory you are listed in.
Search your business name and work through what comes back. Old addresses, a mobile number on one listing and a landline on another, a trading name that does not match the registered one — those are the ones that cost you. Minor punctuation differences are not worth losing sleep over; a phone number that genuinely differs is.
Expect to find at least one directory you had forgotten you were on.
3. Put your town in your homepage title
The title tag is the blue line in search results. A surprising number of small business homepages do not say where the business works.
Instead of Smith Heating Ltd | Expert Plumbing Services, use Plumbers in Sunderland | Smith Heating Ltd. Same information, one of them tells Google and the customer where you are.
On WordPress with Rank Math or Yoast, it is the homepage meta title field. Elsewhere, ask whoever maintains the site to change the <title> tag. Our meta title checker will show you how it currently reads and whether it is the right length.
4. Ask one customer for a review, and reply to one you have
Not two hundred reviews. One, today, and then the habit.
Generate the direct link from your Google Business dashboard and send it to somebody whose job you finished this week. Then reply to your most recent review, including if it is a good one.
5. Write one page about one place you work
Pick the town you most want work in. One page, one place, one service.
- H1: service and place“Bookkeeping in Bristol”. Exactly how somebody would search for it.
- A few paragraphs that could only be about that townAreas you cover, the kind of jobs you get there, anything a local would recognise. This is the whole difference between a page that works and one that does not.
- What you actually do, in bulletsShort. Specific.
- A phone number and a formAbove the fold if you can.
Length does not matter. Local detail does. A short page with genuine specifics beats a long one with the place name swapped in — and if you are tempted to duplicate this page for five other towns by find-and-replace, do not. That is the version that backfires.
What this hour will not do
These are genuine quick wins and worth doing. They are not a substitute for the rest of it.
- It will not fix a site Google cannot readIf pages are blocked from indexing or the site is broken on mobile, none of the above reaches anybody. The technical checks come first if you suspect that.
- It will not beat a competitor two years ahead of youSomebody who has been publishing and collecting reviews since 2024 is not overtaken in an afternoon.
- It will not happen this weekExpect weeks before anything registers and three to six months before it shows in enquiries.
What it will do is remove the reasons you are currently invisible that cost nothing to fix. Plenty of businesses never get that far.
Done all five?
The free audit tells you what to do next, in order, and what you can still handle yourself. Written by one of us. It is lead generation and we are not pretending otherwise, but you get it without a call first.
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