Local SEO for UK trade businesses

The four things local search rewards

Local ranking is complicated in detail and simple in outline. Google is trying to work out which nearby business is most relevant, most established and most likely to satisfy the searcher. Everything useful you can do falls into one of these buckets.

• Relevance: does your profile and site clearly say which services you do, and where?
• Proximity and coverage: is your service area described honestly and consistently?
• Prominence: reviews, mentions and links that show you are a real, active business.
• Technical health: a site that loads fast on a phone, is crawlable, and has a real page per service.

What we audit

We work from what is publicly observable plus your connected website. Where a field is owner-only and we cannot see it, we record it as unknown rather than inventing a score.

• Google Business Profile: completeness, categories, services, description and photo signals we can see publicly.
• Website: mobile speed, heading structure, page-per-service coverage, internal links, schema and crawler access.
• Consistency: whether your name, phone number and coverage read the same everywhere.
• Reviews: volume, recency and whether you are replying.

Why most trade sites underperform

The common pattern is a single page trying to rank for every service in every town. Search engines cannot tell what that page is about, and neither can a customer. The fix is usually fewer, better pages: one substantive page per real service, written to answer the query, with proof on it. That is duller than it sounds and it works better than anything clever.

Honest expectations

Local SEO compounds slowly. A new or thin site typically needs months of consistent work before positions move meaningfully, and nobody controls Google's ranking or your position in the map pack. We measure where you stand, fix what is provably broken, and record what changed and when.