How to get your business to show up on Google in your town
Type what you do plus your town into Google - “plumber Cleveleys”, “dog groomer Fleetwood”. If you’re not on that first screen, this is the to-do list. It’s the same one we work through for clients, in the same order, because each step makes the next one work harder.
1. Claim and finish your Google Business Profile
The map results - the three businesses with stars under them - come from Google Business Profile, not your website. Claim yours, then finish it: every service listed, real photos of real jobs, opening hours, the works. Google fills that gap with whoever bothered. Most of your competitors haven’t. This is the highest-return hour a local business can spend on marketing.
2. Get your reviews moving
You don’t need five hundred reviews; you need recent ones, steadily. Two a month beats twenty last year - Google reads a stale profile as a closed business. Build it into the job: when a customer says thanks, that’s the moment to ask. Reply to every review too. Google watches that, and so does the next customer reading them.
3. Give every service its own page
Google matches searches to pages, not to businesses. If your website is one page that says “we do roofing, guttering and fascias”, you’ve got one lottery ticket for three draws. A page each for roofing, guttering and fascias - written properly, naming the areas you cover - is three tickets, each one a better match than a competitor’s homepage. This is why we stopped building one-page websites: even our £500 starter sites get five pages, because that’s what ranking locally takes.
4. Say where you are - everywhere
Your town and area should appear on your pages like it matters, because it does: in the page titles, in the text, in the footer with your address. Google can’t rank you in Fleetwood if your website never commits to being there. And make sure your name, address and details match everywhere they appear online - directories, socials, your site. Mismatches make Google hesitate, and hesitation costs rankings.
5. Be the answer when people ask AI
A growing slice of your customers now ask ChatGPT or their phone’s assistant who to call instead of scrolling Google. Those systems lean on the same signals - a complete profile, consistent details, real reviews, pages that plainly say what you do and where. Do steps one to four properly and you’re not just ranking; you’re becoming the recommendation.
Do these in order and you’ll be ahead of most of your high street within a couple of months. If you’d rather know exactly where you stand first, our local SEO and AI search service starts with a free audit - a short breakdown, straight to your inbox, of what’s holding you back and what it’s costing you, no meeting required.