Local SEO checklist for Sydney businesses

“Local SEO” sounds technical. In practice it is mostly admin that nobody got around to, and the businesses winning in the map pack are usually the ones that filled everything in.

Work through this in order. The first section is free and takes an afternoon.

Google Business Profile

This is the listing that puts you on Google Maps and in the three results above the normal links. For a lot of Sydney service businesses it gets more views than the website does.

• Claim and verify it. If you have not, someone else may have. Search your business name on Google Maps and check.
• Primary category, chosen carefully. This single field decides which searches you are eligible for. “Electrician” and “Electrical installation service” surface differently. Look at what the businesses ranking above you chose.
• Every service listed individually, with its own description. Not one entry called “electrical”.
• Service area set properly if you do not have a shopfront. Hide the address, list the suburbs you actually travel to.
• Hours, including public holidays. Wrong hours cost you calls and Google notices when people report them.
• Photos of your actual work, added regularly. Not stock images. Ten good job photos beat a logo.
• The Q&A section, seeded with questions customers really ask. You are allowed to ask and answer your own.
• Posts, every few weeks. A finished job, a seasonal reminder, a price change. It signals the listing is alive.

Reviews

Reviews affect both whether you rank and whether someone calls you after they find you. A business with 40 reviews at 4.6 beats one with 6 reviews at 5.0 on both counts.

• Ask every satisfied customer, at the moment the job finishes — not three weeks later by email.
• Make it one tap. Get your review link from your profile, shorten it, and put it in a text message template on your phone.
• Reply to every review, including the bad ones. A calm reply to a bad review does more for a reader than the five-star ones above it.
• Never buy reviews. Google is good at spotting them now, and the penalty lands on the listing you depend on.

Your website

One page per service

A single “Services” page listing everything you do will not rank for any of it. Each service needs its own page with its own heading, its own description, and enough detail to be worth reading.

Suburb pages, but only real ones

A page for each area you genuinely work in can do very well — “air conditioning repair Surry Hills” is a far easier search to win than “air conditioning repair Sydney”.

The trap is generating fifty near-identical pages with the suburb swapped. Google treats that as what it is. If a suburb page cannot say something true and specific about working in that suburb, do not make it.

Name, address and phone, identical everywhere

Your business name, address and phone number should be byte-for-byte the same on your website, your Google listing, and every directory. “Suite 2/14 Smith St” and “2/14 Smith Street” are different strings. Pick one and use it everywhere.

The technical minimum

• Loads in about a second on mobile data. Test it on your own phone, off wi-fi.
• Phone number tappable in the header on every page.
• A form short enough to finish in the car park.
• LocalBusiness schema markup, so your details are machine-readable rather than inferred.
• An SSL certificate. Free, and a browser warning will cost you more than it saves.

Citations and directories

A citation is any mention of your business name, address and phone online. Consistency across them helps Google trust the details.

You do not need hundreds. You need the handful that matter — True Local, Yellow Pages, Hotfrog, Yelp, and the two or three directories specific to your trade. Beyond that there are diminishing returns and a lot of spam.

What to do first

1. 01Finish the Google Business Profile completely. Free, highest return, one afternoon.
2. 02Set up a review request system. Free, compounds forever.
3. 03Build a page for each of your top three services.
4. 04Fix site speed on mobile if it is slow.
5. 05Add suburb pages for the three areas you most want work in.
6. 06Clean up citations last. It matters least and takes longest.