What is at stake in a local search
When somebody searches for a plumber, an accountant or a restaurant, the engine does not rank sites the way it does for a general search. It answers a different question: which of the relevant businesses is nearby and credible?
Three signals dominate, and none depends on the size of your company:
- Relevance: does your activity match what is being asked, and is that stated clearly somewhere.
- Proximity: where you are, or what area you declare you cover.
- Prominence: reviews, mentions, consistency of your information across the web.
This is the most favourable playing field for a small operation. A serious tradesperson, with a complete listing and consistent contact details, regularly gets ahead of a competitor with a bigger but neglected site.
The business listing, your shopfront off your site
For many local searches, your listing is seen more often than your website. It appears on the map, it answers directly, and a visitor can call you without ever opening your home page.
Which fields actually weigh and which are decoration are detailed in our article on the fields that count in a business listing. In two lines: the primary category, the opening hours you actually keep, recent photos and reviews make the difference. The description, contrary to a widespread belief, makes very little.
One mistake is enough to cancel the rest: wrong opening hours. A visitor who travels to a closed door leaves a negative review, and a negative review weighs more than ten well-filled fields.
Consistent contact details, the most neglected point
Your name, address and phone number appear in dozens of places: your site, your listing, directories, social networks, professional platforms. Search engines cross-reference these occurrences to establish your existence and your location.
When they diverge, confidence drops. And they almost always diverge, for mundane reasons:
- A move that one directory was never told about.
- A switchboard number replaced by a mobile on the site, but nowhere else.
- A company name written four different ways, with or without the legal form.
- An address abbreviated here, spelled out there, with an extra line somewhere else.
The rule is simple and admits no exception: choose one exact spelling of your name, address and phone number, and never deviate from it, not even by an abbreviation dot. Our audit compares what you display on your site with what you mark up, and flags the contradictions.
Markup, to be read rather than interpreted
An address written in the footer is text. A machine has to guess that "12 Lilac Street, 06000 Nice" is an address, that "+33 4 93 ..." is a phone number, and that both belong to the same entity.
Markup removes that guesswork. By declaring a structured data block of the business type, you supply your name, address, phone number, opening hours and service area in a form the machine reads directly, with no risk of error.
This point has become markedly more important with answer engines. An AI assistant recommending a business to its user needs information it can state without being wrong. Free text exposes it to error, structured data does not.
Area pages, and the trap to avoid
A business covering several towns is often tempted to create one page per town. The method works, on one strict condition: each page must have genuinely different content.
Duplicating a text and changing the town name produces exactly the opposite of the intended effect: pages judged worthless, competing with each other. That is cannibalization, and it is fixed by merging rather than multiplying.
An area page that deserves to exist contains something specific: work carried out there, response times particular to that area, local constraints, testimonials from customers in that town. Below that threshold, a single page that honestly lists the towns you cover does better.
Where to start
- Check your opening hours and correct them. Five minutes, and it is the only point that can cost you a customer today.
- Freeze one spelling of your name, address and phone number, then correct it everywhere it diverges.
- Set the business markup on your site. A single intervention.
- Put a systematic review request in place after every job. It is the only one of the four that compounds over time.
Our free audit measures eight local SEO points, including the consistency between what you display and what you mark up. The category appears only if your site shows signals of local activity: a site with no geographic anchor is not judged on ground that does not concern it.
Romain Ben
Rémy Ginoux