There's a big difference between someone searching “how to choose upholstery fabric” and someone searching “upholsterer in Aveiro”. The first is still doing their homework and might take months. The second is within half an hour of you, has already made up their mind about the problem, and is looking for someone to solve it this week.
The good news is that these searches are far easier to win than national ones. The competition is your local area, not the whole country, and what needs doing fits into an afternoon — with light upkeep after that.
The map takes the best spot
On a search with a place name, Google shows a block with three businesses and a map first, and only then the normal results. That block gets most of the clicks.
Getting into it doesn't depend on the website: it depends on your Google Business Profile — known for years as Google My Business, and a lot of people still call it that. It's free, it's the single best-returning piece of work in local SEO, and it's poorly filled in at the vast majority of businesses.
The essentials: the right primary category (it's the field that carries the most weight and the one most often botched), the exact address, up-to-date opening hours — including bank holidays —, a phone number someone actually answers, photos of the real premises, and a description written by you.
Reviews count, and so do replies
Between two similar businesses, the one with more reviews, and more recent ones, almost always wins. You don't need five stars: you need volume and activity.
What works is asking at the right moment — when the job's finished and the customer's happy — and making it easy with a direct link. What doesn't work is buying reviews: they're identifiable, and the risk of the profile getting suspended isn't worth it.
Reply to all of them, especially the bad ones. A calm reply to a complaint gets read by dozens of people who will never write a word themselves and who are deciding whether to call you.
What the website needs to say, in text
Three things, and all three trip people up regularly.
- The address and phone number as text, not inside a nice-looking image in the footer. If it's in an image, as far as Google's concerned, it doesn't exist.
- Written the same way everywhere — on the website, the Business Profile, Facebook, the directory you signed up to back in 2019. “Street” in one place and “St” in another isn't a disaster, but consistency helps.
- A proper contact page, with a map, opening hours and directions — not one line and a form.
If you cover areas beyond your own — a garage in Aveiro that also does call-outs to nearby towns, say — a page of its own for each area can pay off. But only if it has real content about work done there. Cloning the same page and swapping the place name is one of the few things in SEO that still gets penalised.
Local links are worth more than directories
A link from the local paper, the trade association, the club you sponsor, or a supplier that lists you as a partner tells Google your business genuinely exists in that place.
It's worth more than fifty listings in generic directories, which carry almost no weight these days. And it has the added benefit of actually bringing people along with it, which directories stopped doing a long time ago.
One hour a month is enough
This isn't a project: it's a short routine. Checking the hours before each bank holiday, adding a couple of photos, replying to new reviews, posting an update.
What ruins local SEO isn't a lack of strategy — it's the profile abandoned three years ago, with pre-pandemic hours and a phone number nobody answers any more. If you want help with the ranking side, that's what we do in SEO and SEM; the technical foundation of the site is covered in websites.
Do you show up in searches near you?
Tell us where you work and what the people who hire you search for. We'll see where you stand today and what's needed to show up.