Getting found in your own region

If you work for customers in your own town or region, there is a way of getting found that works faster than anything else: making sure Google knows where you are. Plenty of business owners skip this and wait for results they could have had somewhere else.

Why local is easier

Getting to the top for "cleaning company" is a fight with hundreds of players. Getting to the top for "cleaning company Brussels" is a fight with a handful of businesses from your own area. That same difference applies to almost every trade.

On top of that, someone who adds a place name is often closer to a decision. They are not searching out of curiosity, they are looking for someone who can come out.

Start with your Google Business Profile

This is free and, of everything you can do, it delivers the fastest result. How to create and verify it is set out step by step in creating a Google Business Profile and collecting reviews. It is the panel that appears on the right when someone types in your name, and it is what puts you on the map for searches in your area.

Make sure it is complete. A half-filled profile is shown less often than a complete one.

• The right category, as specific as possible.
• Opening hours, including around public holidays.
• The area you work in, if you travel to customers.
• Real photos. Of your work, your premises, your team. No stock photos, everyone recognises those.
• Your services, written out in the words customers use.

Reviews carry the most weight

Of everything you can do locally, reviews carry the most weight, and they are also the easiest to collect. Just ask for them, right after you have delivered something and the customer is happy. That is the moment when people say yes.

A few things that help:

• Send a direct link, so nobody has to go searching. That link is in your business profile.
• Ask personally, not through an automated email that goes out to everyone.
• Respond to every review, including the less pleasant ones. A measured reply to criticism often convinces more than ten stars.
• Spread them out. Twenty reviews in a week looks bought.

Make sure your details are the same everywhere

Google lines up the information about your business: your site, your business profile, directories, your social media pages. If one place has your business name with an old phone number and another has an abbreviation with a new one, it does not know which is right. That costs you visibility.

Go through everything once and write exactly the same business name, the same address and the same phone number everywhere. Dull work, done once, and it works.

Put your town in your text

Not forced, but present. Name the town you are in and the towns you travel to, in your page title, in a heading and somewhere in the running text. If you work in several places and that is genuinely part of your business, a page per town is worth it, but only if that page actually has something to say about the area.

How long does this take?

A business profile has to be verified; reckon on a few days to two weeks. After that it goes faster than ordinary visibility: within a few weeks you usually appear on the map for searches in your area. That is considerably shorter than the months it takes to compete on broader search terms, as we described in my website is live, what now?

If you want it faster still, you can run local ads alongside it. How that works is set out in advertising for your business, where to start?