Local SEO is not complicated. You are overthinking it, and most of what a B2B SEO programme needs does not apply to a business serving one town.
Google says local results are ranked on three things: relevance, distance and prominence. Its own help page on how local ranking works defines relevance as how well your profile matches the search, distance as how far you are from the person searching, and prominence as how well known you are. The same page says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.
You cannot move your building. So this local SEO checklist for service businesses works on the other two. Relevance comes from a handful of plain pages that say exactly what you do and where. Prominence comes from a complete, active Business Profile and a steady stream of reviews.
That is the whole checklist. Eight rules. Most service businesses do three of them.
One page per service, one URL each
Every service you sell gets its own page with its own address. Boiler repair gets a page. Boiler installation gets a different page. A homepage that lists everything in a bullet list does not count. A "services" page that covers six things in six paragraphs does not count either.
The reason is relevance. A search for emergency drain repair is matched against pages, and a page about drains in general matches it less well than a page about emergency drain repair. One page, one job.
Take an illustrative plumbing firm that sells five services. Before, it has one homepage and one contact page. After, it has seven pages:
- /services/ (the index)
- /services/boiler-repair/
- /services/boiler-installation/
- /services/emergency-drain-repair/
- /services/bathroom-plumbing/
- /services/landlord-gas-safety-checks/
- /contact/
Five service pages is the minimum. If you sell twelve services, you need twelve pages. If you cannot add a page to your site without paying a developer, that is the first thing to fix, because every other rule depends on it.
One service, one page, one URL.
Titles and H1s: the service in the area, nothing cute
The browser title of each service page is the service and the area. "Boiler repair in Guildford". "Tree removal Bristol". "Emergency drain repair Leeds". Under about 60 characters. No slogan, no "welcome", no string of towns separated by pipes.
The H1, the big heading at the top of the page, says the same thing as the title. Not a clever variation. The same words.
Cute titles lose because the searcher is not looking for cute. They typed the service and the place. A title that says the service and the place tells them, and tells Google, that this is the page. "Keeping Your Home Warm Since 1998" tells neither.
Boring wins the title.
About 500 words that answer what customers actually ask
Each service page needs enough text to answer the questions a customer asks before they book, and no more. For most services that comes to about 500 words written the way you would explain it on the phone.
Here is the test. Write down the five questions you get asked most before a job: how fast can you come, what does it cost, do you cover my area, are you certified, what happens if it is worse than expected. Then read your page. If the page answers none of them, it fails, whatever its length.
A page padded to a word count with the same sentence rewritten three ways is worse than a short page that answers the five questions. A page that is a list of thirty town names is not a page about your service; it is a list of town names, and Google's guidelines treat stuffed town lists as the spam they are.
Write it like a human. Say what the service is, who it is for, what happens when they book, how pricing works and where you go. Then stop.
Five hundred honest words beat two thousand padded ones.
Link the pages together with a /services index
The index page at /services/ lists every service and links to each page. Each service page links back to the index and across to the two or three services customers usually buy alongside it. Boiler repair links to boiler installation and to gas safety checks.
This does two jobs. The customer who landed on the wrong page can get to the right one in a click. And every page on your site is reachable from the one that gets the most visits, so none of them is an orphan Google has to find on its own.
A useful rule from our B2B service page optimisation guide applies here too: the number of internal links a page receives should match how much it sells. Your two biggest services get the most links. Your rarest service still gets at least the index and one neighbour.
Every page reachable from the index in one click.
The Google Business Profile checklist
Your Business Profile is the second half of this local SEO checklist, and for many service businesses it is the first thing a searcher sees. Google's guidelines for representing your business set the rules, and breaking them risks the profile itself.
Fill it out completely:
- Name. Your real-world name as it appears on your van and invoices. No added keywords, no added town. Google's guidelines say including unnecessary information in the name is not permitted and can lead to suspension.
- One profile per location. The guidelines say not to create more than one page for each location, in one account or several. A second profile does not double your chances; it splits them and risks both.
- Address. If customers never visit you, hide the address and set a service area. The guidelines say service-area businesses should hide their address; only a staffed storefront that receives customers shows one.
- Primary category. The one thing you mostly do. Secondary categories for the rest.
- Hours. Set and kept current, including holidays.
- Services. Every service from your page list, added to the Services section.
- Photos. Real ones. The van, the team, finished work. Add new ones every month.
- Posts. One short update at least every 30 days. A finished job, a seasonal reminder, a new service.
- Reviews answered. Every review, good or bad, gets a reply within a few days. Thank the good ones by name. Answer the bad ones calmly and offer to fix it offline.
A profile that is complete and visibly active is what prominence looks like at this scale. An empty profile with the wrong name is the most common local SEO problem we see, and it costs nothing to fix.
Complete, active, answered.
If the mechanics are sound but qualified demand is missing, we can pinpoint where the programme loses commercial focus — book a call
Ask every happy customer for a review
This is half of local SEO and almost everyone skips it.
Reviews feed prominence, and they feed the decision the searcher makes after the ranking. BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, a panel of 1,002 US adults, found that 97% read reviews for local businesses, 49% trust them as much as a personal recommendation, and 89% expect the owner to reply. The sample is American, so treat the exact figures as directional. The shape is not in doubt.
Build the ask into the moment the job ends. The job is done, the customer is pleased, you say one sentence and send one link:
"If you were happy with today, a quick Google review helps the next person find us. Here is the link."
Then send the direct review link by text while you are still standing there. Do it every time. Not when you remember. Not only for the big jobs.
The arithmetic, illustratively: a firm doing 20 jobs a week that asks every customer and gets one review in ten adds 2 a week, 104 a year. A firm that asks when it remembers, say one job in five, at the same one-in-ten rate adds 0.4 a week, about 21 a year.
20 jobs × 1 ask each × 10% = 2 reviews a week 20 jobs × 0.2 asks each × 10% = 0.4 reviews a week
Same customers. Five times the reviews. The only input that changed is whether you asked.
Ask every time, with the link in hand.
What does not move local rankings
Four things take up most of the time service businesses spend on SEO, and none of them moves the result.
Keyword-stuffed business names. "Dave's Plumbing | Boiler Repair Guildford | Emergency Plumber" in the profile name is against Google's guidelines, invites suspension, and reads as desperate to the customer. Your real name and a correct category do the job.
A second profile or a second site for the next town. One location, one profile. A thin duplicate site with the town swapped in the title is a doorway page, and it dilutes the reviews and links that should all point at one place.
Blog volume. Twelve articles about the history of central heating do nothing for a search for boiler repair in your town. The service page does that work. Write a blog post only when customers keep asking a question that does not fit on a service page.
Paying for ranking. Google's own help page says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. Anyone selling you one is selling something else.
The honest limit of this checklist is distance. If you serve an area from its edge, a competitor in the centre with a worse profile may still outrank you for searches made near them. The checklist moves relevance and prominence; it does not move your van.
Timing is the other thing to know. Google's own core updates page says some changes take effect in days but others take several months for its systems to learn and confirm. Do the eight things, then give it a quarter before judging.
Name, category, one profile, patience.
Run the checklist on your own site with the Claude prompt
Reading a checklist and running it are different jobs. So we wrote a prompt that does the running.
You paste in your service list, your areas, your page titles and text, and the fields from your Business Profile dashboard. Claude scores each of the eight rules out of two, tells you the one fix that most likely changes what a local searcher sees first, writes the missing titles and H1s for you, drafts the review ask, and gives you a seven-day order of work. It will also tell you first if anything in your profile breaks Google's rules.
Download the local SEO Claude prompt. It is free and it takes about twenty minutes to fill in.
If you would rather have the pages written and the profile run for you, our SEO service does that for service firms with more than one location or more than ten services; our case studies show the kind of work involved. Most single-location businesses do not need it. They need the eight rules and a Saturday morning.
One boundary. If your business sells to other businesses across a region or a country rather than to households in a town, this checklist is the wrong tool. Start with the B2B SEO strategy guide, run the B2B SEO audit checklist by layer, and do B2B keyword research for the low-volume terms that carry value.
The prompt does the audit; you do the Saturday.
FAQ
How many service pages do I need?
One per service you actually sell and want to be found for. Five services, five pages. A page covering several services counts as zero for this rule.
How long should a service page be?
About 500 words, and it must answer the five questions customers ask before booking. A 300-word page that answers all five beats a 1,500-word page that answers none.
Should I put the town in my Business Profile name?
No. Google's guidelines say the name must be your real-world name without added location or keyword information, and breaking that can get the profile suspended. Put the area in your service pages and your service-area setting instead.
How often should I post on the Business Profile?
At least once every 30 days, plus a new photo each month. A profile with no post for six months reads as closed.
How long before the checklist shows in rankings?
Google's core updates documentation says changes can take days or several months to be learned and confirmed. Work on a quarter, and judge the review count and enquiries, not just the position.
Summary
- Build one page per service, each at its own URL, before touching anything else.
- Title and H1 are the service in the area, under 60 characters, identical to each other.
- Each page answers the five questions customers ask before booking, in about 500 words.
- Complete the Business Profile to Google's guidelines: real name, one profile, hidden address for service areas, every service listed, a post every 30 days, every review answered.
- Ask every happy customer for a review at the moment the job ends, with the link in hand.
- Run the Claude prompt on your own site, fix the lowest-scoring rule first, and give it a quarter.
Actualyse builds B2B SEO programmes that compound into a durable source of qualified pipeline. Book a call to talk through where yours stands.
