Who this is for
Service businesses that sell to a geography: trades, clinics, agencies, consultancies, installers, legal and accounting firms. Your competition is rarely national — it is four other firms in the local pack. This checklist covers what actually moves that ranking, and deliberately excludes the tactics that get profiles suspended.
1. Google Business Profile fundamentals
- Claim and verify the profile. Unverified profiles do not rank.
- Choose the most specific primary category available, then add secondary categories only for services you genuinely offer. The primary category is one of the strongest ranking inputs in the local pack.
- Set service areas honestly. If you are service-area only, hide the address rather than inventing one.
- Fill every service with a real description and price range where you can.
- Add genuine photos of your work, team and premises. Stock imagery is visible and unpersuasive.
- Keep hours accurate including holidays — hours mismatches generate negative feedback signals.
- Answer questions in the Q&A section yourself before someone else guesses.
2. Location pages that deserve to exist
The test for a location page is simple: could you swap the city name and have it still make sense? If yes, delete it. A page worth publishing includes work you have actually done in that area, local specifics (property types, regulations, seasonal factors, travel logistics), pricing context relevant to that market, and internal links from related service pages.
Ten genuinely distinct pages will outperform a hundred templates, and they carry no doorway-page risk. If you cannot write ten, write four.
3. On-page signals
- Name, address and phone in crawlable HTML — not inside an image or loaded by script.
- A contact page with an embedded map, service areas and a phone number using a
tel:link. - Title tags combining service and location naturally: "Emergency Electrician in Leeds", not "Electrician Leeds Leeds Electrician Best".
- Internal links from service pages to the relevant area pages and back.
- Breadcrumbs reflecting a real hierarchy.
4. LocalBusiness schema that matches reality
Emit LocalBusiness (or a more specific subtype) with the exact name, address, phone, opening hours, geo coordinates and areaServed your page displays. Mismatches between schema and visible content are a trust problem, not a shortcut. Never mark up an address you do not occupy, and never emit review markup for reviews you did not receive — both are policy violations with real penalties.
5. Citations and consistency
Pick the directories that matter in your country and industry, list accurately, and keep the data identical everywhere. Then audit for old listings: previous addresses, closed-down brand names, and a former phone number sitting on an aggregator will quietly undermine everything else. Fixing conflicts usually produces more improvement than adding new listings.
6. Reviews, earned honestly
Build a request into your job-completion process — a short message with a direct review link, sent the day the work finishes. Aim for steady flow rather than campaigns. Reply to every review, including the negative ones, factually and without defensiveness; prospective customers read the replies more carefully than the reviews. Reviews mentioning specific services and locations help those specific queries.
7. Local relevance beyond directories
Sponsorships, local trade associations, supplier pages, local press coverage and community involvement produce the kind of local links and mentions that correlate with pack rankings. They are slower than buying citations and considerably more durable.
8. Technical foundations people skip
- Mobile performance — most local searches are on phones with poor connections.
- Correct indexing of every location and service page; check coverage in Search Console rather than assuming.
- No duplicate contact pages or stray staging subdomains competing for the same terms.
- HTTPS everywhere and a single canonical hostname.
- Fast, working contact forms with confirmed delivery — a broken form is an invisible ranking-independent revenue leak.
9. Measure what matters
Track local pack position for your core service-plus-city terms, calls and direction requests from the profile, form submissions by landing page, and Search Console impressions for local queries. Rankings without enquiries mean the page is ranking for the wrong intent, which is a content problem, not a local SEO one.
What to avoid entirely
Virtual offices and mailbox addresses, keyword-stuffed business names, review incentives, city-swapped page templates, and schema describing a business that does not exist at that location. Every one of them is detectable, and the recovery from a suspended profile costs far more than the shortcut saved.