Search engine optimisation has a reputation for being complicated, and at national scale it is. For a business serving a thirty kilometre radius, it is much narrower and much more practical. You are not competing with the whole internet. You are competing with the handful of businesses in your trade in your area, most of whom have done nothing.
Google Business Profile comes first
For a local trade, the profile that appears in Google Maps often generates more calls than the website does. It is free, it takes an afternoon to fill in properly, and it is the first thing worth doing.
- Fill in every field. Categories, service areas, hours, services offered, attributes.
- Add real photographs, and keep adding them. A profile that is updated signals a business that is trading.
- Make the name, address and phone number identical everywhere they appear online.
- Ask satisfied customers for a review, in person, at the moment they are pleased. Nobody leaves a review from an email two weeks later.
Write pages for the way people search
People do not search for "quality residential solutions". They search for "roof repair" plus a town name, or they search for their symptom: "tiles slipped after storm". Your pages should use the same words.
This means one page per service rather than one page listing all of them. A page called "Roof repairs" can rank for roof repairs. A page called "Our services" that mentions roof repairs in a bullet list among eleven others will not.
Location pages, done honestly
A page for each town or suburb you genuinely serve is legitimate and effective. A hundred pages generated from a template, each identical except for the place name, is spam, and search engines have been able to spot it for years.
The test is whether the page contains anything true and specific about working in that place. Jobs you have done there, how far it is from your base, what the housing stock is like, anything real. If you cannot write three honest sentences about working in a town, you probably should not have a page for it.
The technical part is smaller than people claim
For a site of ten or twenty pages, technical SEO is close to a checklist rather than an ongoing discipline. It has to load fast on a phone. Each page needs its own title and description. Headings should be in order. Images need alt text. There should be a sitemap. That is most of it.
Where technical work does pay off is speed, because it is the one factor that is simultaneously a ranking signal and the reason visitors leave. A site that takes six seconds on mobile data loses people regardless of where it ranks.
What to ignore
- Keyword density. It has not mattered for a very long time.
- Buying backlinks. At best wasted money, at worst a penalty.
- Blogging weekly about nothing. One genuinely useful article beats twelve thin ones.
- Meta keywords. Google stopped using them in 2009.
How long before it works
Longer than anyone selling it to you will admit. Months rather than weeks, and the gains arrive unevenly. This is exactly why paid search exists: it fills the diary while the slower work compounds. Anyone promising fast SEO results is either paying for them or making them up.