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Local SEO for a small business: what moved in 90 days

Local SEO for a small business in 90 days: the Google Business Profile, one page per service, weekly reviews, local links, and what actually moved.

He put his phone on my bench and said, "Look at this." It was a screenshot from that morning: "électricien Aubagne" typed into Google from his van, two streets from his own depot, and three electricians on the map. Not him. One of the three was a franchise that sends its vans from Marseille. He has been an electrician in Aubagne for nineteen years.

What he wanted is called local SEO: being on that map, and in the regular results under it, when someone nearby searches for an electrician. For him it took four things: the profile, a page for each service on his website, reviews every week and some links from people in town. Calls from the profile went from 9 in January to 41 in April and he did not buy a single ad.

A couple of things we tried did not change anything and I will say which ones.

The profile comes first

The first thing I looked at was his Google Business Profile. Google says that local results depend on relevance, distance and prominence, and that prominence "means how well-known a business is." He cannot move his depot so we started with relevance, and the problem was already in the first field, the primary category. In the 2026 Whitespark survey, 47 local search experts put this field in first place for the map pack, just ahead of the distance between the searcher and the business.

His category was "Electrical installation service." It is correct, but nobody types that on a phone. I changed it to "Electrician" in the first week of February and eleven days later he started to appear on the map for searches made within about one kilometer of his depot.

Then the address. The profile showed his house in Gémenos and two customers had already knocked on his door on a Saturday. He did not find that funny. Google says: "If you're a service-area business, you should hide your business address from customers." We hid it the same day and added the towns where he works as service areas. Google allows up to 20 but he works in nine towns, so we put in nine.

In third place on the Whitespark list are keywords in the business name. This one I do not do for clients. People send me competitors with names like "Electrician Aubagne 24/7 Fast Repair," and yes, it works for a while. But it is against Google's guidelines, which say "your name should reflect your business's real-world name," and any competitor can suggest an edit that removes it or gets the profile suspended. On his profile the name is the one painted on his vans.

One page per service

His website had one page called "Services" with fourteen bullet points on it. Google had nothing to show from his site when somebody searched for a car charger installer in Aubagne, only a list where chargers were on line nine. The Whitespark experts put "dedicated page for each service" in first place for the regular results under the map, and he had zero.

We started with EV chargers, his best-paying job. A wallbox with the paperwork is around 1,400 € and I could not find one electrician in Aubagne with a page about it. Four more pages followed, one of them for the electrical inspection that sellers need before they sell a house.

I wrote them from a forty-minute call I recorded while he was driving between two jobs, so a lot of the sentences are his. He explained to me why he never gives a price for rewiring over the phone, and that explanation is now on the page almost word for word. Every page has a price range and two reviews from customers who had the same job done. They are between 500 and 700 words long.

We kept his Wix site. If yours cannot take new pages easily, the article on what a website costs in 2026 explains the options.

Reviews, every week

When he came to see me, he had 11 reviews on Google and the most recent one was from March 2023.

I showed him the BrightLocal numbers because he did not believe me. Of the 1,002 American adults in their 2026 survey, 74% said they only care about reviews from the last three months, and 47% said they will not use a business with fewer than 20 reviews. Google does not say much about how ranking works, but on reviews its help page is quite clear: "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking."

So what we did was very simple. Every evening after a job, he sends a text message to the customer from the van. It is two lines with their first name and a direct link to his review form. He sends it to every customer, not only the ones who looked happy, because Google's policy does not allow you to "selectively solicit positive reviews." He also does not offer anything in return. In the US, that part is also the law: an FTC rule from August 2024 bans incentives that depend on what the review says.

After ninety days he had 52 reviews. That is about one review for every three texts, which in my experience is normal for a tradesman.

One of the new reviews had two stars. It was from a woman in La Penne-sur-Huveaune whose appointment he had moved twice. You cannot remove a review just because it is unfair, and anyway 89% of the people in the BrightLocal survey expect the owner to reply. He wrote three sentences, apologized for the second change and did not argue about the first one. I am quite sure this reply brought him more jobs than any five-star review.

On busy days the text can go out automatically from the invoice. It is the kind of small job I describe in the post on what an AI agent does for a business owner. For him an alarm at 7 p.m. was enough.

I do not send emails to strangers to ask for links. For a tradesman it almost never works. So I asked him which people already knew him and had a website, and he found five while we were talking.

A charger brand approved him as an installer in 2024 and they have a map of installers on their website, but he had never filled in the form to get on it. He did it on my laptop in four minutes. His cable wholesaler and the chamber of trades were one phone call each. The town hall was a form. The rugby club took three weeks and two reminders, even though his logo is on their shirts.

On PagesJaunes there was also an old mobile number that he stopped using in 2021. We corrected it the same week. (The studio is in the south of France, hence PagesJaunes. For a plumber in Ohio, read Yelp: Google checks those listings there too.)

What moved, and what didn't

His ranking from the depot is not his ranking across town, so to follow the map we used a grid of 25 points around the center of Aubagne. In January he showed up at none of them for "électricien Aubagne". By the end of April it was 14. Calls from the profile, in its Performance tab, went from 9 in January to 41 in April. In April the EV charger page alone brought six quote requests, and four of those became jobs.

We published six Google posts, one per week, and we saw no difference in calls or in positions so we stopped.

He was also paying 49 € per month to an agency he had worked with before, for a "citation package." It sent his name, address and phone number to around sixty directories. We canceled it in the first week and none of the numbers went down. The Whitespark 2026 report says more or less the same thing. Citation signals lost a little weight and review signals gained some. I have seen the same thing on five other profiles since.

From the 11th arrondissement of Marseille, eight kilometers away, he is still not on the map. There is not much we can do about distance, and he asked me about it twice.

In May I asked ChatGPT for an electrician near Aubagne who installs car chargers and his name was in the answer, next to the franchise from Marseille. BrightLocal says 45% of consumers used ChatGPT or another AI tool for local recommendations in 2026. The year before it was 6%. These tools read the same reviews and the same service pages as Google. I explain how they choose what to quote in the guide to generative engine optimization.

A local SEO checklist for the first 90 days

Days 1 to 10, on the profile:

  • Set the primary category to the word your customers type.
  • Hide the address if customers never come to you, and add your towns one by one.
  • Set your hours to when you actually answer the phone.
  • Use the name that is on your van, nothing more.
  • Add twenty photos of real jobs.

Days 10 to 40, on the website:

  • Write one page per service, with a price range and two reviews from the same kind of job.
  • Add LocalBusiness structured data and use the same phone number everywhere.

Every week, for the ninety days and after:

  • Send a review request after every job, to every customer, and offer nothing for it.
  • Reply to every review within one week.
  • Ask the people who already know you for a link.

Paying for local SEO services

Most local SEO services I see for small businesses are monthly contracts of a few hundred euros, and what you receive each month is a PDF report. Ask them what they will change in the first thirty days. If the answer is citations and "content," I would keep the money.

For him all of this was about four days of my work spread over three months. The texts he still sends himself, every evening. When I build a website the profile fixes and the service pages are part of the website service, from 1 900 € HT in two to four weeks. Writing the copy for those pages is not included, and the quote says so on line one.

You can book a 15-minute call and I will look at your profile with you.

FAQ

How long does local SEO take to work?

When the profile already exists, changes like his category usually show in two or three weeks. For him it was eleven days. Service pages and reviews take more time so I wait ninety days before I judge them, and for a new business with no reviews at all it is more like six months.

Do I need a website for local SEO?

For the map, no. You can be on the map with only a profile. But the results under the map are web pages and for these results the Whitespark experts put a dedicated page for each service in first place.

How many Google reviews does a small business need?

Google has never given a number for this. For customers the number 20 is important, because in the BrightLocal 2026 survey 47% said they will not use a business with fewer than 20 reviews. In my experience three or four new reviews every month are better than thirty in one month and then nothing, and Google shows the date on every review.

Sources

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