Local search: being found by someone two streets away

There are two ways of being searched for online. In the first, somebody wants to learn something. In the second, somebody wants to go somewhere now. The two intentions have almost nothing in common, and the second is the one that fills a shop.

Local search is the less competitive of the two and the more profitable. It is also the more neglected, because it does not look like marketing: there is no campaign to launch, there is a listing to fill in correctly and keep current.

This article sets out what actually decides local ranking, in the order it matters, and what can be fixed in an afternoon. Most of the fixes are free.

Figures are sourced under each chart. Where Algerian data exists we use it; where it does not, we say so rather than borrowing a foreign number without flagging it.

For a local search, the Google Business Profile listing is shown above the classic results and occupies the part of the screen visible without scrolling. A business with no listing is absent from the area where the decision is made, whatever the quality of its site.

It is the only action in this article that produces a visible effect in days rather than months. It is also the only one that is entirely free and depends on no supplier.

The listing is not a directory entry: it is indexed, compared and ranked. A complete listing, with real opening hours, recent photographs and the exact category, is treated differently from one created and then abandoned. The difference between the two is an hour of work.

One detail that costs positions and that nobody checks: the primary category. It weighs more than the secondary ones, and many businesses picked an approximate one at creation, often because the right one was not obvious in the list. Correcting it takes a minute and it is the best-value action in this entire article.

One frequent case is worth flagging: the listing already exists and you never created it. Such listings are generated automatically from public sources, they often carry wrong hours and a photograph taken by a passer-by, and they behave like yours in an engine’s eyes. Claiming it takes priority over everything else in this article.

A perfect score on six reviews is worth less than an honest score on a hundred. Volume is a signal of reality; the score alone is not, and a flat five out of five read by a customer triggers suspicion more often than confidence.

Regularity counts as much as volume. Thirty reviews in one week and then nothing for a year describe a campaign, not a business; two or three a month for two years describe a trade.

Answer everything, including and especially the negative ones. The reply is not written for the reviewer: it is written for the person who will read both in six months, wondering how you handle a problem.

One last thing about reviews, and perhaps the most useful: ask at the right moment. A satisfied customer says so willingly while still standing in front of you, and never three days later by email. The moment of payment, or the moment they thank you, is the only one where the response rate is high, and it costs one sentence.

Add a use of reviews few businesses exploit: they are the best source of customer vocabulary available to you. The words your customers use to describe what they liked are precisely the ones they will type to look for a business like yours, and they are there, written down, free, in your own reviews.

Wrong hours are worse than no hours. Someone who travels and finds the door shut does not try again, and often leaves a review that costs longer than the missed visit.

The moment it matters most is predictable: public holidays, Ramadan, exceptional closures. Those are precisely the days people check before going out, and therefore the days a current listing gets noticed.

Get into the habit of setting special hours in advance rather than on the morning itself. It is two minutes, and it lands at the moment when the gap between you and a careless competitor is most visible.

There is an expensive variant of this mistake: hours that are accurate but incomplete. A listing showing opening until six without noting that the kitchen closes at four sends customers who will leave disappointed, and their disappointment will land in the reviews rather than in a conversation with you.

One thing to do while you are in the settings: fill in the attributes the listing offers and nobody completes — access, payment methods accepted, services available. They look secondary and they answer exactly the questions a customer asks before travelling, which is the moment your listing is read.

Start with the honest part: most of this article can be done without an agency. Claiming the listing, fixing the category, putting in the real hours, adding five recent photographs — that is an hour of your time, it is free, and it produces the fastest gain of everything described here. We say so because it is true, not because it is clever.

What we add begins where the work becomes tedious rather than difficult. Inventorying every mention of your business on the web, correcting each variant of the name, address and number, chasing the directories still carrying an address from before you moved: it is long, there is nothing clever about it, and it is cumulative.

We then write your site’s local page with what only a resident knows — the landmark, the transport line, where to park, the floor, what is opposite. That is the part no template can produce, and the part that separates a local page from one duplicated per town, which the article explains above does not work.

And we put the review routine in place: when to ask, with what sentence, who replies and within what time, including to harsh reviews. We do not promise you a score, and we do not buy reviews — the risk, set out in the FAQ below, is losing the whole listing for a gain nobody notices.