Why local search matters more than it did five years ago

Five years ago, local search was a way of getting people to your website. You appeared in a list, someone clicked, and your site did the rest of the work.

That chain has broken in three places, and each break moves the decision further away from your control.

The answer arrives before the click

A large share of local searches now end without anyone visiting a website. The map pack, the opening hours, the phone number, the reviews and increasingly a written summary all appear on the results page itself.

Your website is still doing work, but it is doing it indirectly: it is feeding the box that the customer actually reads. If your site is vague about what you do and where you do it, the box will be vague too, and nobody will get far enough to see the nice photography on your homepage.

Assistants are now quoting you, or not

People ask assistants full questions. Where can I get a bike serviced near me this week. Which framer in town does conservation work. Who is open on a Sunday.

The assistant answers by assembling what it can find: your listing, your site, your reviews, directories, local news, other people's mentions of you. Then it names two or three businesses. If you are not in that answer, you were not rejected, you were simply not assembled. It is worth asking one yourself, in your own category, to see what comes back.

This is a real shift. The old game was ranking. The new game is being describable and consistent enough to be picked up and repeated.

Consistency now has teeth

If your hours are wrong on your listing, your website says something different and an old directory entry says a third thing, a search engine used to shrug. Now three sources disagreeing is a reason to trust none of them, and to quote the competitor whose details line up.

The same goes for your name, your address, your phone number and your description. Boring, unglamorous consistency is a ranking factor, and it is free.

What to do about it

Claim and finish your Google Business Profile. Correct categories, real hours including bank holidays, genuine photographs, and the services you actually offer listed individually. The local search checklist covers the rest.

Put the town in the words, not just the footer. One page per main service, saying plainly where you work and what it costs. Not "serving the South West", but the towns you will actually drive to.

Ask for reviews and answer them. Recent reviews, in the customer's own words, are the single richest source these systems have about a small business. A short reply to each one is worth writing.

Fix the disagreements. Search your business name and note every listing that has an old number, an old address or a dead opening time. Correct them one by one. It is a dull afternoon that pays for years.

The part people get wrong

None of this requires you to post more. It requires your basic facts to be right, in the same form, everywhere, and for your site to answer real questions in plain language.

A business that does that well will be recommended by systems it never signed up to, which is a strange and quite good position for a small firm to be in.