Here’s the best news in all of SEO: as a local business, you don’t need to outrank the internet. You just need to outrank the handful of businesses in your region that do what you do. That’s local SEO, and it’s a genuinely winnable fight.
When someone searches “electrician Dunsborough” or “cafe near me”, Google doesn’t serve up the best electrician in the world. It serves up the best match nearby. Your job is to make sure Google knows exactly what you do, exactly where you do it, and that people vouch for you. Here’s how.
Claim your Google Business Profile (and actually fill it in)
Your Google Business Profile is the panel that shows up on the right of search results and on Google Maps, with your hours, reviews, and photos. For local searches, it’s often more important than your website, because it’s what people see first.
Claiming it is free at google.com/business. The difference between businesses that show up and businesses that don’t usually comes down to how completely the profile is filled in:
- Choose your categories carefully. Your primary category is a big ranking signal, so pick the most specific one that fits.
- List every service you offer, using the words customers use.
- Write a description that mentions what you do and the areas you serve.
- Add real photos of you, your work, and your space. Profiles with photos get more clicks and more enquiries.
- Keep your hours current, especially around public holidays.
If I’ve built your website, this is one of the boxes we tick together at launch, so your profile and your website tell Google the same story from day one.
Say where you are, everywhere it matters
Google can’t rank you for “Bunbury” if your website never says Bunbury. It sounds obvious, but it’s the single most common local SEO gap I see.
Your suburb, town, and region should appear naturally in your page titles, your headings, and your copy. Not stuffed in awkwardly, just present. “Wedding photography across Busselton, Dunsborough and Margaret River” reads like a normal sentence and tells Google precisely where you work.
If you serve several towns, consider a dedicated page for each key location. A short, genuinely useful page about your services in that specific area gives Google a direct answer when someone there searches. The trick is making each page actually different, with local detail, not the same page with the town name swapped out. Google notices, and so do customers.
Get reviews, and reply to them
Reviews are a ranking factor, a trust factor, and free marketing all at once. The businesses at the top of the map results are almost always the ones with steady, recent reviews.
You don’t need hundreds. You need a habit. After every happy client or customer, send a short message with your review link. Google gives you a shareable link right inside your Business Profile dashboard.
Then reply to every review, good and bad. It shows Google the profile is active, and it shows potential customers there’s a real human behind the business. A gracious reply to a bad review often does more for you than five glowing ones.
Keep your details consistent
Your business name, address, and phone number should be identical everywhere they appear: your website, your Google Business Profile, Facebook, Instagram, and directories. Mismatched details make Google less confident about who and where you are, and less confident means lower rankings.
While you’re at it, make sure your website footer carries your location and contact details on every page. It’s a small signal, but the small signals add up.
The technical side that quietly matters
Behind all of this sits the stuff nobody sees: your site loading quickly on a phone, your pages properly indexed, location data marked up so Google can read it, and your titles and descriptions doing their job in the search results. This is the part where most business owners’ eyes glaze over, and fair enough. It’s also the part that’s already handled when your website was built properly in the first place, and exactly the kind of thing I dig into with a website audit if yours wasn’t.
How to know if it’s working
You’ll want to watch two places: your Google Business Profile insights, which show how many people found you, called you, and asked for directions, and Google Search Console, which shows the actual searches bringing people to your website.
Never heard of Search Console? The next post in this series covers exactly what it is and how to set it up in about ten minutes. It’s free, and it’s how you stop guessing whether any of this is working.
And if you’d rather skip straight to results, The SEO Boost handles all of the above for you, from your Business Profile to your page titles to the technical fixes, with a before and after report so you can see the difference.
