Almost every home service business we talk to has the same story about local SEO. They searched their own trade and their own town, saw themselves near the top, and assumed the job was done. Then they wondered why the phone was not busier.
The reason is that Google answers local searches based on where the person searching is standing. Your own driveway is the one spot on the map where you are close to guaranteed to look good. A few miles away, in the towns you would happily drive to, the results can look completely different, and from where you are sitting you would have no way of knowing.
What we write about here is the part of local search you can actually move: the Google Business Profile, the service and location pages on your site, the reviews, and the proximity problem that no amount of keyword stuffing solves. Some of it you can do yourself in an afternoon. Some of it takes months. We try to be clear about which is which.
