When someone near you searches for the service you sell, Google shows a short set of local businesses with a map. You want your business in that set, with the right phone number and the right address, every time an Arkansas customer looks. Local SEO for small business is the monthly work that keeps your business ready for those searches.
We run that work for our clients every month in the same order. We start from one record of your business details, read the places those details appear, read five local searches and fix what differs. Each fix closes only when the live listing shows it.
How Google picks the local results
Google ranks local results on three factors, and it defines each one in plain words. Relevance means “how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for,” and distance means “how far each business is from the customer who’s searching.” The third factor, prominence, comes down to “how well-known a business is.”
Distance sits outside your control, because the searcher decides where he stands. Relevance starts from your Business Profile, by Google’s own definition.
Google adds one line that shapes the whole job: “Businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results.” Complete and accurate info is something we can check every month. Much of our monthly local work is finding where your details differ and correcting the listings on other sites.
How local SEO for small business works each month
Each month the work starts from one record of your business name, address, phone and website. We build that record from our client file and our copy of your profile details. We compare every listing we read against it.
A phone number written with dots in one place and with hyphens in another counts as a format difference only. A missing suite number counts as a real difference, and it gets a fix.
Next, we search twelve listing sites for your business. The twelve are Yelp, BBB, Angi, YellowPages, Apple Maps, Facebook, Nextdoor, the Chamber of Commerce, Manta, MapQuest, Foursquare and Bing Places. On each listing we find, we compare the name, the phone and the address with the record.
We mark each site found or not found. When a site blocks our read of its page, we compare the listing text that shows in the search results. Your website is part of the record and stays out of this compare.
Then we read Google’s results for five searches. Each search pairs a service you sell with a town you serve. For each one we record the position in the search results and whether your business shows in the local results. We run these reads through Ahrefs, a search data tool.
Last, for each profile we can read, we add the profile’s own 28-day numbers to the month’s file. Those numbers come from Google’s Business Profile itself, and they count how often customers saw the profile and what they did on it.
The search you can run today
You can run one of those five searches yourself right now. Pick the service that brings you the most work. Then search Google for that service with the name of a town you serve, the way a customer would type it.
Look at the short set of businesses beside the map. If your business appears there with the right phone number, a customer who searches that way can reach you. If it appears with an old number or a wrong address, a customer who calls from that result may never reach you.
If your business does not appear at all, the work has a clear starting point. Send us the search you ran and what you saw, and we will run the other four with you.
How we pick the five searches
We set your five searches once and keep them in your file. For a plumber who serves three counties, the five might pair his busiest services with a town in each county.
The five searches stay the same from month to month. A search that changes every month gives you no way to compare one month with the next. Holding the same five lets you see whether your business moved into the local results or slipped out of them.
When a read fails, we mark it as missed and write down the reason. A zero or a not found stands only for a read that happened. That rule keeps a bad day at the data source from looking like a bad month for your business.
Your Business Profile and its numbers
Your Google Business Profile keeps its own numbers in a view called Performance. Google defines calls as “the number of times a customer clicked on the call button on your Business Profile,” and directions as “how many people asked for directions to your business.” Website clicks count “the number of times people clicked on the website link on your Business Profile,” and views count “how many people viewed your Business Profile on Search and Maps.”
The same view also counts bookings, “the number of bookings people completed,” and messages, “the number of different conversations through messages.” Our 28-day set splits impressions on Google Search and on Google Maps into desktop and mobile. We read the full set again each month.
The listing sites
Your business details live on many sites you may never visit. A listing on one of them can have an old phone number from years ago, or an address missing its suite number. A customer who finds that listing has no way to know it is wrong.
Correcting a listing on another site is business listing management, and our own staff does that work. We compare each listing with your record and correct the ones that differ. Our post on business listing management sets out that work in detail.
How a finding becomes a fix
Each listing that differs from the record becomes one written row on your action list, with an id that carries the date. The row has the site, a link to the listing, what the listing shows against the record, and the fix it needs. One finding gets one row, so nothing gets lost between months.
A row closes only when a fresh check of the live listing shows the fix. A change requested on a site does not close the row. A change that shows on the live page does, and the close has the date of that read.
The next month’s audit runs every read again. A listing that slips back to an old number shows up as a new finding, and it gets a new row. That repeat is the reason local SEO runs every month.
For the full set of reads, our post on what a local SEO audit checks goes through each one. The profile itself has its own work, which our post on Google Business Profile optimization covers.
Your website and the local searches
Your website has local searches too. Every Friday we run a search review for each SEO client, and it reads Google Search Console for the last 28 days. The review lists the pages that sit between position 8 and position 20 on Google, with the top searches behind each page.
When one of those searches pairs your service with a town, the page behind it already shows on Google for that search. The fix pass puts the search into the page title or the main heading where it fits. It also adds two links to the page from older pages on the same site.
The same review lists the pages Google shows often and few people click, and we measure that against a click rate floor for your site. A page title changes at most once in 28 days, so Google reads each title before the next one lands. Before each change we save the old wording, and after it we read the live page to confirm the change shows there.
The local results and the website work together. A customer who finds you on the map may click through to your site, and a customer who finds your site may call from it. Both paths end at your phone.
What the work looks like across a year
In the first month we build the record and find the first round of differences. Those early rows close one by one as each live listing shows its fix.
After that, we read the same twelve sites and the same five searches every month. A new row appears when a listing on one of those sites differs from the record again.
Local rankings work with one person answering
We manage eight client accounts. Our own staff does the local work, including Google Business Profile management and business listing management. Ty Woods answers for that work himself, and no account manager sits between you and the work. We are based in Arkansas and serve clients nationally.
Each month you get one PDF report. Our local rankings service brings that monthly work to Arkansas businesses.
Send us your Business Profile
Send us a link to your Business Profile, and we will read it with you. We will run the five searches and list the first listings we would correct. Call us at 501.232.1017 or send us a note. The consultation costs nothing.