A Local Site That Ranks for Nothing

The state of it

A four-year-old site for a local service business. It loads quickly, works on a phone, has a certificate, and is indexed.

Nothing is technically wrong.

It appears for the business name and for nothing else. Searches for the service, in the town, return five competitors and not this business.

Which is the most common situation in local search, and the cause is almost never technical.

The words are not there

The first and largest cause.

The homepage heading reads Welcome. The services page lists nine words. The about page describes commitment to quality.

Nowhere on the site do the words somebody would actually type appear together: the service, and the town.

A search engine cannot match a page to a query when the page does not contain the terms, however good the business is.

This sounds obvious and it is the situation on a large share of small business sites, because the copy was written to sound professional rather than to answer a question.

There is one page for nine services

The second cause, and it follows from the first.

A single services page listing nine things cannot rank for any of them, because it says almost nothing about each.

A competitor with a substantial page about one service, in one town, will outrank it every time for that search.

The fix is not nine pages immediately. It is three pages about the three services that actually produce revenue, each written properly.

Three good pages beat nine thin entries on one page, and they are achievable in a week rather than over a quarter.

The listing is unclaimed

The third cause, and for a local business frequently the largest.

A substantial share of local search results are drawn from business listings rather than from websites.

An unclaimed or incomplete listing means being absent from the map results entirely, which for many searches is most of the visible page.

Claiming it, completing the categories, hours, service area and photographs is free and is usually the single fastest improvement available.

It also frequently produces more enquiries than the website does, which is worth knowing before spending money on the site.

A worked example

A service business in this exact position, invisible for four years.

Three changes over about three weeks: claiming and completing the listing, rewriting the homepage heading to name the service and the town, and writing three real service pages.

Within two months the business was appearing in map results for its main service.

Within four it was appearing on the first page of ordinary results for two of the three service pages.

Nothing technical was changed. The site was the same site, with words on it and a claimed listing.

The owner had previously been quoted a substantial monthly sum for search work, none of which would have addressed any of the three causes.

What to write on a service page

• The service and the town in the heading.
• What the job involves, step by step.
• What it costs, as a range.
• How long it takes.
• Two or three examples of that work.
• The questions people ask about it.

Written that way, the page contains the search terms naturally, because it is answering the questions somebody typing them has.

Keyword placement is not a separate exercise from writing usefully. It is the same exercise.

The counter-case

Where ranking is not the problem to solve.

A business at capacity, where more enquiries are a burden. Search visibility is expensive to acquire and pointless to have unused.

Trades where the work arrives through relationships and tender rather than search, where effort belongs in credentials and capability statements.

And highly competitive categories dominated by national operators with substantial budgets, where local rankings are achievable and general ones are not.

In that last case, the answer is narrowing: a specific service in a specific town, where the competition is other local businesses rather than aggregators.

Reviews as a ranking factor

Under-appreciated in local search, and it is not only about the star rating.

The number of reviews, how recent they are, and whether they mention the service and the area all contribute to local visibility.

A business with four recent reviews mentioning specific work outperforms one with twenty from 2016.

Which makes asking for them a search activity as much as a reputation one, and the asking is what most businesses never get round to.

A short message after a job, with a direct link, converts a reasonable proportion. Asking in person and following up with the link converts considerably more.

What people are actually typing

Worth checking rather than assuming, and it does not require a tool.

Search for your own service as a customer would and read what appears in the suggestions as you type.

Look at the questions box in the results, which lists what people actually ask.

Ask your last ten customers what they searched for, which produces answers no tool would suggest.

The terms customers use are frequently not the terms the trade uses, and writing entirely in trade vocabulary is a common way to be invisible while describing exactly the right service.

How long it takes to see anything

Worth setting expectations, because impatience is what leads businesses to abandon changes that were working.

Listing improvements can show within days to a few weeks, which makes them the encouraging place to start.

New pages typically take one to three months to settle into position, and longer in a competitive area.

Which means a business that rewrites its site and checks the following week concludes nothing happened, and frequently reverts or gives up.

Note the date you make changes, then look properly at three months rather than continuously. Checking daily produces noise and anxiety and no useful information.

And expect improvement to arrive as a gradual increase in enquiries rather than as a visible jump in position, since most of the movement happens across searches you never think to check.

The order to work in

1. Claim and complete the listing.
2. Put the service and town in the homepage heading.
3. Write three real service pages.
4. Add the town to page titles.
5. Get a few reviews.
6. Then consider anything technical.

The first three account for most of the improvement on most invisible small sites, and not one of them costs anything beyond a few days of time.

The listing side is covered in claiming your Google My Business listing.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.