Local SEO for tradespeople: GMB, citations, reviews

Local SEO is a different game from "regular" SEO. It's less about backlinks and clever content, and more about proving to Google that you're a real local business that customers like.

The three pillars

1. Google Business Profile (GBP), primary category, full hours, services list, photos, posts.
2. Citations, your business listed consistently across Yell, Bing Places, Checkatrade, Yelp, Apple Maps, and trade-specific directories.
3. Reviews, recent, consistent, varied. 25+ reviews is the threshold where Google starts trusting you.

The site signals

• Address on every page (footer is fine).
• LocalBusiness schema markup with correct NAP.
• Service pages per service (not one generic "Services" page).
• Service-area pages for the towns you actually cover, with genuinely different content per town, not doorway pages.
• Fast load time on mobile (under 3 seconds).

What doesn't matter as much as you think

• Number of keywords on each page (Google figures out intent from context).
• Exact-match anchor text on backlinks (this stopped mattering a decade ago).
• Submitting to 200 random directories (a few major ones do far more than a bulk submission).

For a personalised local-SEO audit, request a free audit.