Guide

How to rank in your own town

One of the strangest things about local search is how sharply it changes over a few kilometres. You are on page one in your own village and nowhere in the town you do half your work in. There are reasons for that and most of them are fixable.

Distance is doing more than you think

Google leans heavily on where the searcher is standing. If your registered location is twenty kilometres away, you are fighting uphill in that town no matter how good your site is.

That is not a reason to fake an address. It is a reason to be genuinely more relevant to that town than the alternatives.

Give each area a real page

A single page listing thirty towns does nothing. A proper page for a town you actually work in, mentioning the kinds of jobs you do there and the housing you see, gives Google something to match.

Only build pages for places you really cover. Thin pages for towns you have never worked in do more harm than good.

Reviews from that area help

Reviews that mention the town and the job carry weight with both Google and the person reading. You cannot script them, but you can ask customers in that area a bit more often.

Photos tagged from jobs in the area do a similar quiet job.

Be consistent everywhere you are listed

Your name, address and phone number need to match across your site, your Google profile and every Irish directory you appear on. Old numbers and former addresses floating around confuse the picture.

This is dull work and it is one of the highest value things we do for new clients.

Give it time and keep going

Local rankings move slowly and unevenly. You will often see map visibility improve before the website pages do.

The businesses that win are the ones still adding pages, photos and reviews in month eight.

Common questions

Why do I rank in one town and not the next?

Distance from the searcher is a major factor, along with how relevant your pages, reviews and listings are to that specific area.

Should I make a page for every town near me?

Only for places you genuinely work in, and each page needs real content about the work you do there. Thin duplicate pages can hurt you.

Where to go next

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