How Do I Get My Business to the Top of Google Locally?

Local search has a shape, and once you can see it the work becomes obvious. There are two competitions happening on the same page, they are won by different things, and most small businesses are accidentally competing in neither.

This is what actually moves a local business up, in the order we would do it, with an honest note about how long each part takes.

The two results, and why it matters

Search a trade and a town on a phone and you get, in order: a few paid results, then the map block with three businesses and a pin, then the ordinary blue link results.

The map block is controlled almost entirely by your Google Business Profile. The results underneath are controlled by your website. They are separate systems with separate rules, and the map block sits higher, gets more taps, and is the one most trades have never seriously worked on.

Step one: finish the Google Business Profile

This is free, it takes an afternoon, and it is the highest return thing on this page.

• Verified. Nothing else counts until it is.
• The most specific accurate primary category. The single strongest signal on the listing.
• Address or service area set correctly. If you travel to customers, hide the address and list the towns you actually work in.
• Every service listed individually, with a line of description each.
• Your own photographs, added regularly rather than in one batch two years ago.
• Hours that are right, including bank holidays.

Most listings we look at are about a third done. Finishing one is often worth more than everything else on this list combined.

Step two: collect reviews, and keep collecting

Review count and recency both feed the map ranking. Forty reviews with the newest from last month beats forty reviews from 2024.

The mechanics are simple: ask out loud when you finish the job, send the short review link by text while you are still outside the house, and reply to every review in your own words. There is no deadline on replying and anybody who gives you one has invented it.

What we will not do, and what you should be wary of anybody else doing, is print a star average into your site's code as a rating claim. That is a claim search engines treat seriously and we only put things on a page we can stand behind.

Step three: a page per service

Now the website half. The single most common structural mistake is one page listing eight services in a bulleted list. That page is competing for eight different searches and winning none of them, because it says thirty words about each.

Give each real service its own page with a few hundred words that only make sense for that service: what the job involves, what it usually costs, what people get wrong, what you would ask before quoting. That page can win its search. The bullet point cannot.

Step four: pages for the areas you actually work

Area pages work when they are real and fail badly when they are not. A page about a town you genuinely work in, mentioning the sort of housing stock, the jobs you tend to get there and somebody you have worked for nearby, is a useful page and ranks like one.

A hundred pages generated by swapping the town name are thin content. They do not rank, they make the whole site look automated, and Google is unambiguous about it. If you cannot write a distinct page about a town, you probably should not have one.

Step five: be quick, especially on a phone

Most local searches happen on a phone, often on poor signal, and slow pages lose people before they load. Speed is both a ranking factor and, more importantly, the difference between a visit and a bounce.

The practical version: keep the page light, do not load a carousel and three tracking scripts, size your images properly, and test on a real phone rather than a laptop pretending to be one. We build static sites largely for this reason, which is not clever, it is just less weight.

Step six: make the phone easy to find

Ranking is only half of it. A first place result that leads to a page where the number is in the footer in small grey text has converted nobody.

Number in the header on every page, tappable. Number again near the top of the page. A form for people who will not ring. And a line saying which areas you cover, because the most common reason a good lead leaves is not being sure you come out to them.

What order to do it in

1. Finish the Google Business Profile. This week, free.
2. Start asking every customer for a review and reply to all of them. Ongoing, free.
3. Split your services onto their own pages. Once, and it lasts.
4. Write real pages for the areas you genuinely work in. A handful, not a hundred.
5. Fix the speed and put the phone number where a thumb lands.
6. Only then consider paying for anything.

That order matters because each step makes the next one worth more, and because the first two are free. A lot of local businesses skip to step six and wonder why it is expensive.

What we do

Every build we do includes the structure above: a page per service, real area pages, static and fast, and the Google Business Profile set up alongside rather than left to you. Builds are £395, £650 or £1,200, paid once, and you own the site. It can be split into three payments, same price, no interest and no fees, within twelve months.

Care plans are £45, £85 or £150 a month with no minimum term, and for local search the useful part is somebody keeping the pages current as what you do changes.

You can see how it is put together on our work page, where concept builds are labelled as concepts.

Common questions

Written by Salvo Della Gana, co-founder of SH Studios. He writes the code behind every SH Studios site and keeps the live ones running.