Local SEO for small businesses: 5 things that actually move rankings
Local SEO is 80% five specific activities and 20% everything else. Here are the five — skip the rest until you’ve nailed them.
Local SEO is a discipline with a lot of noise. Most of what an “SEO agency” sells an SME is either already free or doesn’t move the needle. These five do.
1. Google Business Profile, fully populated
This is non-negotiable. Every SME that outranks you in the local pack has: a claimed profile, the right category, accurate hours, every service listed, 20+ recent photos, posts updated monthly, and Q&A populated with the real questions customers ask. Most SMEs fill in three fields and wonder why they don’t rank.
2. Reviews velocity
Google’s local algorithm weights recent reviews more than old ones. A practice with 400 reviews from 2021 and 2 from this month loses to a practice with 80 reviews collected over the last year. Fix: ask every happy customer, every week, using a direct ‘leave a review’ link. One every few days forever beats a blitz twice a year.
3. Service-area pages with real content
If you serve multiple towns, you need a page for each — but not “<service> in <town>” doorway pages. Real content: local landmarks, directions, parking, the difference for that town’s audience. Google detects thin templated pages and ignores them.
4. Schema.org LocalBusiness markup
Tell Google explicitly what you are, where, and when you’re open. Schema markup is invisible to visitors but rocket fuel for Maps rankings and rich results. For medical and beauty businesses, add the category-specific subtypes (Dentist, HealthClub, etc.).
5. Citations — but only the right ones
An SME needs to be listed, consistently, on the half-dozen directories Google trusts in their country: Yelp (UK/US), Yell.com (UK), Checkatrade (UK trades), Trustpilot, Bing Places, Apple Maps, Facebook, and the two or three category-specific ones (Healthgrades, Hotfrog). Stop paying “citation services” to list you on 200 obscure directories — it stopped mattering years ago.
“Local SEO isn’t a mystery. It’s a five-item checklist that most SMEs half-complete and then blame Google.”
What to skip
- “Link building” from overseas marketplaces. Useless at best, a manual penalty at worst.
- Doorway pages for every postcode. Thin content, banned pattern.
- Obscure directory submissions — 300 bad citations rank you nowhere.
- Keyword-stuffed service descriptions. Google reads like a human; write for humans.
Do the five above for twelve months before spending a penny on anything else. Nine times in ten, that’s the entire programme.
What’s included in our SEO offer
Technical SEO ships standard on every Stratevo build, every tier: schema markup, semantic HTML, XML sitemap, fast Core Web Vitals, mobile-first responsive, clean URLs. That’s the technical foundation — covered by your subscription.
Content SEO — service-area pages with real local content, monthly review prompting, citation cleanup, ongoing on-page optimisation — is included on Business (£119/mo) and Premium (£249/mo). On Premium you also get a quarterly strategy call to look at the rankings and decide what to push next. If you’re paying a separate SEO retainer alongside your website, the two should be one bill, not two.