Local SEO — getting found in Google searches like "dentist near me" or "plumber in Brighton" — runs on a small, stable set of signals. Most of what you read online about local SEO is content marketing for SEO agencies that want to sell you a $2,000-a-month retainer. The actual list of things that matter for a small business is short, almost all of it is free, and you can do every step in a single afternoon.
Step 1 — Claim and complete your Google Business Profile
This is the single highest-return action in local SEO. Google's local pack (the map results above the regular SERP) is populated almost entirely from Google Business Profile listings. Go to business.google.com, claim your business, verify by postcard or phone, and fill in every field: hours, phone, website, address, photos, services. Pick the most specific category Google offers — "Italian restaurant" beats "restaurant", "family dentist" beats "dentist". Photos matter more than people realise; listings with 10+ photos consistently outperform sparse ones.
Step 2 — Make sure your NAP is consistent everywhere
NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone — and the rule is that the exact same string appears wherever your business is listed online. Google cross-references citations across the web; inconsistent NAP (one listing has "St" and another has "Street", or the phone number has a different format on Facebook) reduces confidence and rank. Pick one canonical format and use it everywhere: website footer, Google Business Profile, Yelp, Facebook, Apple Maps, industry directories.
Step 3 — Put your address and phone in the footer on every page
Google's crawlers parse contact-info-shaped text out of pages automatically. A footer with your full address, phone, and business hours on every page tells Google you are a real local business — and it puts useful info one scroll away for any human visitor too. If you operate from multiple locations, list all of them on a "Locations" page and link to it from the footer.
Step 4 — Earn local citations from credible sources
A citation is any mention of your business on another website that includes your NAP. The most valuable local citations come from local sources: the local chamber of commerce, regional newspapers, industry associations specific to your area, and large national directories that explicitly serve your country (e.g. Yell in the UK, Yellow Pages in the US, Pages Jaunes in France). Avoid paid mass-submission services — most of the directories they post to are low-quality and ignored by Google.
Step 5 — Get reviews on your Google Business Profile
Review count and average star rating are major local-pack ranking factors. The most effective way to get reviews is the most boring: ask every happy customer at the end of the engagement, in person or by email, with a direct link to your Google review form. Do not buy reviews — Google detects this and the penalty (your listing disappears from local results) is severe. Respond to every review, positive or negative, briefly and professionally; Google reads the responses as a signal that the business is active.
Step 6 — Add LocalBusiness schema to your website
LocalBusiness is a Schema.org type that lets you mark up your business name, address, phone, opening hours, and geo-coordinates in machine-readable JSON-LD. Google uses this to verify your details against your Google Business Profile and to surface rich snippets in search results. OneClick adds LocalBusiness schema automatically on every site where you have entered an address; if you are on another platform, you can paste a JSON-LD block into the site's head section.
What not to bother with
Three things eat time and produce nothing. First, keyword-stuffed title tags — "Best dentist Brighton Hove Worthing Sussex" was effective in 2012 and now reads as spam. One clean, descriptive title per page. Second, mass-produced location pages — generating a separate landing page for every nearby town with the same content templated through it is a textbook doorway-page violation. Third, "SEO audits" that produce a 60-page PDF — almost none of the findings will be in the six steps above, and almost none of the six steps need a paid audit to identify.
How long to see results
Local SEO is faster than national SEO. Google Business Profile changes can show up in local pack rankings within days. Citation building and review accumulation take weeks to months. Schema markup is read within the next crawl, typically a day or two. Realistic timeline from a complete cold start: 2 to 4 weeks for the local pack listing, 2 to 3 months for stable organic rankings on competitive local queries.