Category: SEO Management
Here’s something worth trying. Search Google for what you do, something like “electrician near me” or “accountant”, while you’re sitting in your office in Salisbury. There’s a good chance your business appears in the map results near the top.
Now try the same search from a car park in Amesbury, or from a friend’s house in Downton. For a lot of local businesses, the result is quite different. You’ve dropped down the list, or disappeared altogether, and a business you’ve never heard of has taken your place.
Nothing is broken. This is how Google’s local results are designed to work, and once you understand why, you can do quite a lot about it. What you can’t do, and shouldn’t try to do, is pretend to have an office in every town.
Why your position changes a few miles down the road
Google decides which businesses to show in its map results using three main things. How well your business matches what the person searched for. How well known and well thought of your business is. And how close you are to the person searching, or to the place they mentioned in their search.
That last one, distance, is what catches most people out. When someone in Downton searches for “plumber”, Google assumes they’d like a plumber nearby. A plumber based in Downton, or a few minutes away in Redlynch, has a natural head start over one based in the middle of Salisbury, even if the Salisbury business is bigger, better reviewed and has been going for twenty years.
So when you check your rankings from your own desk, you’re seeing the best possible version of your results. You’re as close to your business as anyone can be. Your customers in Wilton, Amesbury or Alderbury are seeing something different.
What you can’t change
You can’t move your business closer to everyone at once, and Google doesn’t allow you to fake it.
It’s tempting to think the answer is a second address. Some businesses set up a Google Business Profile at a friend’s house, a virtual office or a post box in each town they want to be found in. Google’s rules are clear that a profile needs to be a real location where you either meet customers or are genuinely based, and it does check. Fake listings get suspended, sometimes taking the real profile down with them, and getting a suspended profile reinstated can take weeks. It’s a shortcut that tends to end badly.
The same goes for stuffing town names into your business name. Calling yourself “Smith Plumbing Salisbury Amesbury Downton” on your profile breaks Google’s guidelines and is an easy way to get reported by a competitor.
What you can change
The good news is that distance is only one of the three things Google looks at. You can’t do much about where you are, but you can do a lot about how relevant and how well known your business looks, and a strong business will often beat a closer, weaker one.
Get your Google Business Profile in order
If you visit your customers rather than them coming to you, set yourself up as a service area business and add the towns you actually cover. Google lets you add up to 20 service areas, and suggests keeping the whole area within about two hours’ drive of where you’re based. For most Salisbury businesses that’s more than enough to cover Amesbury, Wilton, Downton, Alderbury, Laverstock and the villages around them.
It’s worth being clear about what this does and doesn’t do. Your service areas tell customers where you go, and they’re shown on your profile. On their own, they won’t make you appear in Downton as strongly as a business that’s actually based there. But they’re part of the picture, and a profile without them looks less complete.
Fill in everything else too: the right categories, a list of your services, a description that says what you do and where, your opening hours and plenty of real photos of your work.
Earn reviews that mention where you’ve been
Reviews are one of the strongest signals Google has about how well thought of a business is. Ask every happy customer for one. If a customer in Amesbury mentions that you fitted their new boiler in Amesbury, that’s a genuine, helpful detail for anyone reading it.
Don’t write reviews for yourself or ask friends to, and don’t offer discounts for good reviews. As well as being against Google’s rules, it’s against the law in the UK.
Give each town a reason to find you on your website
Your website can do a lot of the work your map listing can’t. If you regularly work in Amesbury, Downton or Wilton, it’s worth having pages that talk about the work you do there, written properly for people in those places.
The key word there is properly. A page that copies your Salisbury page and swaps the town name won’t help, and Google has been ignoring that sort of thing for years. A page that talks about real jobs you’ve done in the area, the kind of properties or businesses you work with there and how quickly you can get to them is useful to a reader, and that’s what Google is looking for.
This helps in two ways. It gives Google a clear sign that you serve those towns, and it gives you a chance to appear in the normal search results below the map, where distance matters much less.
Get mentioned locally
Links and mentions from other local websites tell Google that you’re a real, active part of the community. Sponsoring a youth football team in Amesbury, appearing in a Downton village newsletter or being listed by a local trade association all help, as long as they’re genuine. If your local netball team has a website that can link back to you, it’s worth asking. We said the same in our local SEO tips back in 2019, and it still holds.
Check your results the way your customers see them
Searching from your office won’t tell you the truth, and neither will searching from your own phone, because Google knows where you are and what you’ve searched for before.
The simplest way to get a fair picture is to search from the places your customers are. Next time you’re in Amesbury or Downton for a job, take thirty seconds to search for what you do. If you want something more thorough, there are tools that check your map position across a grid of points around Salisbury and show you where you’re strong and where you fade. Either way, it’s much better than relying on what you see at your desk.
Be realistic, and be patient
Most local businesses will always be strongest closest to home, and that’s fine. The aim isn’t to appear first in every village from Tidworth to Fordingbridge. It’s to make sure that in the towns you genuinely serve, you’re in with a fair chance against the businesses based there.
That takes a bit of time. Reviews build up, pages get indexed and links get noticed over months rather than days. But the work you put in tends to stick, which is more than can be said for a fake address.
If you’d like help being found beyond your own postcode, the friendly, experienced team at Spire Digital help businesses in Salisbury and the surrounding area with search engine optimisation (SEO). Give us a call on 01722 320 500 and we’ll take a look at how you’re showing up.