For local businesses, making sure your customers can find your business by searching for things like ‘plumber near me’ or ‘coffee shop in [town]’ is local SEO. As opposed to general SEO, which is the ranking of business results for searches of unrefined keywords, local SEO is going after customers in the geographic serving area.
A great place to start to make sure your local SEO efforts have the potential for positive impact is to optimize your Google Business Profile. This is the listing people see when they search for your business that includes your listing, hours, a review, and address. Updating your GBP listing is a good exercise to do on a consistent basis to ensure your hours and address haven’t changed and that your listing number is working. Listing inconsistencies may seem small and obvious, but these errors lose your business potential customers.
Another way to check is looking at reviews. A steady stream of new reviews is usually a good sign of good local business visibility. Businesses with no reviews appear less trustworthy, even if the service is great.
Empty reviews areas scare away customers.
Try searching for your business name like a potential customer. Check to see what pops up when you search your business name + city/region. You should see your business when potential customers search for your services with your city/region location. Customers search for local businesses if they don’t see the business in the first search results. Seeing your business pop up on search results is good, even if you are way down the results list.
You are also welcome to be patient when seeing results. Changes to local search engine optimization take time to see results. Improving your business visibility generally takes time. Recent changes you made to your business may take time to see results, that doesn’t mean the changes were not made or will never be seen.
Ask yourself if something else could be impacting your lack of traction after a few months of no movement. For example, are there aspects of your website or your listing details that may require more attention? Also, you may need to direct more effort toward motivating movement in the right direction.