Local search for service businesses: a practical starting point

When someone searches for a service “near me” or in a named town, search engines lean heavily on three signals: how relevant a business is to the search, how close it is, and how prominent it appears across the web. You can’t move your office closer to every customer, but you can make relevance and prominence clear and trustworthy.

Get the Business Profile right

Google Business Profile is often the first thing a local customer sees. Google’s guidelines are specific, and following them closely matters more than any trick.

• Name: use your real-world business name, exactly as it appears on signage and stationery. Adding keywords, locations or taglines to the name breaks the guidelines.
• Address: a real location staffed during stated hours. P.O. boxes and virtual offices aren’t eligible.
• Service-area businesses: if you visit customers rather than receiving them, hide your address and set a service area. Google generally expects that area to stay within about two hours’ drive of your base.
• Categories: as few as possible and as specific as possible. Choose what the business is, not every service it offers.
• Hours: the hours customers can actually reach you, with special hours for holidays.

Ask for reviews, honestly

Reviews influence both rankings and the decision to call. The best approach is simple: ask every customer, at the moment the work is finished, with a direct link and no conditions.

Two sets of rules apply. Google’s policies prohibit offering incentives for reviews, discouraging negative reviews, and selectively asking only happy customers (sometimes called “review gating”). In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission’s rule on consumer reviews and testimonials, in force since 21 October 2024, bans fake reviews and testimonials, paying for reviews that express a particular sentiment, and suppressing negative reviews through threats or false accusations, and allows civil penalties for knowing violations.

Ask everyone, make it easy, and reply to every review, especially the critical ones.

Replies are visible to every future customer. A calm, specific response to a complaint often reassures readers more than another five-star rating.

Make service pages genuinely useful

Your website gives search engines and customers the detail a profile can’t. For each main service, publish a page that says what you do, who it is for, where you work, how the process runs, and what happens after someone gets in touch.

• Use the words customers use. If they say “roof repair”, don’t only say “building envelope remediation”.
• Name the areas you genuinely serve, once and naturally, rather than creating thin near-duplicate pages for every town.
• Answer the common questions honestly, including what you don’t do.
• Keep your name, address and phone number identical everywhere they appear.

Write titles and descriptions for people

Each page needs a unique, descriptive title. Google often writes its own snippet from the page content, but it will use your meta description when that describes the page more accurately, so write a specific summary of what the page offers rather than a list of keywords.

Keep it consistent over time

Local search rewards steady, accurate signals: a profile that is kept current, reviews that keep arriving, and a site that stays useful. Set a monthly reminder to check hours, photos, services and unanswered reviews. It takes minutes and prevents the slow drift that costs enquiries.

Sources

• Google Business Profile: Guidelines for representing your business on Google
• Google Business Profile: Tips to improve your local ranking
• Google Maps user-generated content policy: Prohibited and restricted content
• Federal Trade Commission: Final rule banning fake reviews and testimonials (August 2024)
• Google Search Central: Control your snippets in search results