We spent money on ads for months and watched the phone stay quiet. Then I read a piece on Prospect Horizon about local search and realised we had never finished our own business profile. Half the fields were empty. Our opening hours were wrong, and had been for a long time.

Filling that profile in properly took an afternoon. Address, phone, hours, what we actually do, a few honest photos taken on my phone rather than the stock ones. It is not glamorous work. It is the difference between being findable and being invisible.

Reviews did the rest. I started asking customers, in person, at the end of a job, whether they would mind leaving one. Most say yes if you ask at the right moment. I never write them myself and I never argue with the bad ones. I answer them like an adult and move on.

We also built a page for each service and each town we cover, written by a human who has actually been there. Not the same page with the town name swapped out. People notice, and so does search, apparently.

Contact details are identical everywhere. Same phone number, same address, same spelling of the business name on the site, the profile and anywhere else we turn up. We had an old number floating around for a while and it was quietly costing us calls.

The part nobody wants to hear is patience. Local search did not do anything dramatic in the first weeks. The calls came slowly, then more steadily, and they kept coming without us paying for each one. Paid ads stopped the moment the budget stopped. This did not.