Local SEO Foundation

A website can look good and still be invisible. The site your designer built may be the nicest one in your trade. It can still fail to appear when a customer three miles away types your service into their phone. Looking good and being findable are two different jobs, done by two different parts of the page.

The harder problem is that most owners cannot tell whether an SEO company is doing anything. You get an invoice and a report full of words you would have to look up. That is a fair suspicion. It is the reason this page spells out what actually happens each month. It also says how you can check it yourself, without taking our word for it.

One location, one town, and a competitor list you could name from memory. Foundation is the smallest of the five local SEO levels: the fewest tracked search phrases and the fewest hours per month. If you run more than one address, Local SEO Multi-Location is built for that shape instead.

Every month starts with your Google Business Profile. That is the free Google listing that produces the map pin and the panel of business details on the right side of the results. It is where hours, categories, services, service area, photos, and posts live. Most owners set it up once and never touch it again. So it says the wrong hours, lists two of the nine services they sell, and shows photos from the year they opened. We keep it current, add photos and posts, and answer the questions people leave on it. We also make sure the categories match what you actually want to be called when someone searches.

Then citations. Citations means your business name, address, and phone number listed identically on the directories Google cross-checks: Apple Maps, Yelp, Bing Places, the Better Business Bureau, trade directories in your industry. When they disagree, and they usually do, Google trusts you less. That happens because an old suite number or a disconnected number is still sitting on a listing from 2016. We find the ones that contradict each other and fix them so nothing on the internet argues with your own website.

Next is on-page work and schema. On-page work means editing the real, visible parts of your pages: the headline, the page title that becomes the blue clickable line in search results, the body text, the links between pages. Say a customer searches for "emergency drain cleaning" on a site with one Services page listing nine things in a row. There is no page for Google to show. So we write one, for your approval. Schema is a block of hidden code added to the page. It labels your address, hours, services, and reviews in the exact format Google reads directly. Google does not have to guess by reading the sentence.

Reviews and keyword tracking round out the month. Review generation means asking your recent customers, the ones you approve, for a review at the moment they are happiest. New reviews keep arriving, instead of stopping cold years ago. Keyword tracking means we keep a written list of the exact phrases your customers type. Once a month a tool checks what position you hold on each one. That is how you find out whether you moved into the local pack. That is the map box with three businesses that sits above the ordinary links. It takes most of the clicks on a phone.

You do not have to trust any of that. You get a portal login showing every tracked phrase and your position on it. It shows whether each moved up or down since last month, and the date it was last checked. Alongside it is the list of what was published and changed. You can also check by hand in five minutes: open a private browser window, then search your service plus your town. Look at whether your Google profile is accurate, whether the pages we wrote are live, and whether new reviews have arrived. Positions move slowly and unevenly. Some months a phrase drops for reasons no one controls. The honest measure is the direction over several months, not any single week.