Being found locally: SEO for small businesses that isn't a scam
Most local customers find you through a map and a search on their phone. What actually helps a small business show up in Rosenheim, Munich or anywhere else, and which SEO promises you can safely ignore.
If you run a studio, a practice or a shop, most new customers don't find you by typing your name. They type "physiotherapist Rosenheim" or "florist near me" into their phone and pick one of the first three results on a map. Local SEO is about being one of those three, and it's far less mysterious than the emails promising you "page one on Google" suggest.
Start with your Google Business Profile
Before the website, before anything else: claim and fill out your Google Business Profile. Correct name, address, phone number, opening hours, category, photos, a short description written for humans. Keep the hours up to date on holidays. This profile is what shows up in the map results, and for many local searches it matters more than your website.
Then ask happy customers for reviews, and reply to them, including the bad ones. A calm, specific reply to a one-star review often does more for trust than ten five-star ones.
Make your website say where you are
It sounds obvious and it's missing on a surprising number of sites. Your town and region should appear in the places search engines read first: the page title, the main heading, the first paragraph and the footer. Not stuffed in twenty times, just stated clearly, the way you'd say it to a person.
If you serve several towns, a short section that names them honestly is fine. Separate pages for every village with copy-pasted text are not.
Write for the person searching on their phone, and the search engine usually follows.
The technical basics that matter
- Same contact details everywhere. Name, address and phone should match exactly on your website, your Google profile and directories.
- Mobile first. Local searches are mostly on phones. If your site is slow or awkward there, people leave before they call.
- Structured data. A small block of code (LocalBusiness schema) tells search engines your address, hours and type of business. It's invisible to visitors and takes an hour to add.
- Speed. A site that loads in one second instead of five keeps the people you worked to attract.
Content that actually helps
Write about what people in your area ask. A hairdresser explaining how to prepare for a wedding appointment, a carpenter showing a finished kitchen in a local house, a coach writing about the questions clients bring. Specific, useful pages get found and get linked to. Generic "10 tips" articles written for search engines rarely do either.
What you can ignore
Anyone guaranteeing rankings. Packages of hundreds of backlinks. Monthly "SEO retainers" with no explanation of what was done. Good local SEO is mostly doing the basics well and keeping them up to date, which isn't exciting enough to sell with a guarantee.
I build every site with the technical side in place from day one, because being found shouldn't be an extra you pay for later.