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Local search and why the shop down the road wins

Getting found 6 min read

Why a newer business two miles away appears above you in local results, which parts of that you can change, and which parts you cannot.

You have been trading in the town for eleven years. A business that opened in March two miles away sits above you when you search your own trade on your own phone. It is a particular kind of maddening.

There is usually a plain reason for it. It is not always a reason you can do anything about, and knowing which sort you have is worth more than any amount of work aimed at the wrong half.

Near the top of a local search there is a block of three businesses with a map beside them. Underneath there are ordinary web results. They are two different systems. The map block is built from Business Profiles. The links below it are built from websites.

That matters because "I do not show up" has two different answers. If you are missing from the map block, the work is on the listing. If you are missing from the links below it, the work is on the website. People spend months on the wrong one and conclude that none of it works.

Distance from the person searching is the part you cannot change

Google describes local ranking in three parts: how close you are to the person searching, how well you match what they typed, and how well known the business is. The first of those is settled by your address.

Somebody standing in the town center gets a different list from somebody on the far edge of it. If your unit is on an industrial estate at the boundary, you will lose center searches to a business in the center, and no amount of work moves your building. That accounts for a large share of the cases where a newer rival appears above an older one, and it is worth establishing before you spend anything.

Your own phone is the worst place to check

Your phone knows where you are standing, knows you have visited your own site a hundred times, and is signed in as you. What it shows you is not what a stranger sees.

There is no perfect way to look, because there is no single list to look at. The nearest honest check is to ask somebody across town to search the phrase and tell you what came up, and to repeat that from a few different places over a few weeks. Treat any tool selling you "your rank" as reporting one point on a map rather than a fact about the world.

Whether the words match at all

This is the relevance half, and it is the part most within reach. The category on your listing, the services listed on it, and the words on your website all feed it.

If your site never uses the word your customers use, you are relying on being understood by inference. A roofer whose website says "exterior solutions" and never says "gutter" has made the match harder for no gain at all. Write the trade, the jobs and the towns in the words people say out loud in a kitchen.

Being known about is the slow part

The third piece is prominence, and it moves slowly. It is built out of ordinary evidence that a business exists and gets used: reviews arriving over time, mentions in local places, other websites linking to yours, being listed where a business like yours would be listed.

There is no shortcut here worth buying. The sponsor line on the junior league page, the chamber, the trade body, the supplier who lists their approved installers, the local paper when something happens. It is slow, cheap and real, and much the same list as it would have been in 1985.

One page per real service, not one page per town

The tempting move is twenty pages with the town name swapped and everything else identical. They read like exactly what they are, and thin pages of that kind have been a known problem for years.

Write a page for each service you genuinely do, name your towns honestly on it, and put something on the page that only you could have written. What the job involves, how long it takes, what you find when you open the wall. One real page beats twenty hollow ones and is less work than twenty of anything.

Your name, address and number, the same everywhere

Old listings outlive the businesses that made them. The number from before you changed it, the unit you moved out of, a spelling that is not quite your name, sitting on a directory you had forgotten you were on.

Fix the handful that people and machines actually consult: your Business Profile, the mapping app on the other phone platform, your social pages, the chamber, your trade body, and any supplier directory you appear in. Ignore the long tail. Nobody needs to be on five hundred directories, and the services selling that are selling volume because volume is easy to count and hard to argue with.

What not to pay for

Guaranteed first place. Whoever promises it either does not control the outcome or is describing an advert, which is a different thing you can buy openly and switch off when you like.

Also worth refusing: monthly reports full of rankings and empty of work, submission to hundreds of directories, and anybody who will not tell you plainly what they changed this month. If the honest answer to your question is that your address is on the wrong side of town for the searches you want, a decent person tells you that instead of selling you a retainer against it.

A short checklist

Questions people ask

How long does it take to show up in local results

Weeks for a new listing to settle, months for anything resting on prominence. Anybody offering you a date is guessing at it.

Why do I show up when I search at home but not at the shop

Because the results move with the person searching. Two people a mile apart get different lists, so what you are seeing is your own location rather than a ranking.

Do I have to be in the town to rank in the town

It helps a great deal and there is no honest way around it. A business that travels to customers can appear across a wider area, but the closer business has an advantage you cannot buy off it.

Is there a way to check my ranking properly

Not exactly, because there is no single ranking to check. You can sample it from several places over time, and that is the most anybody can truthfully sell you.

Do Google ads improve my ordinary ranking

No. Ads are a separate auction, they are labeled as ads, and buying them changes nothing about the results underneath.

Should I pay to be listed in directories

Almost never. Be in the few your customers genuinely use and in your trade body, and spend nothing on the rest.

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