Invisible
online.
You are on the list. You are just not on the part of the list anybody reads.
(04 — FOUR USUAL SUSPECTS)(Illustrative — competitor names are invented. Your real position gets checked during the audit.)
Why position eleven is the same as not existing
Local search does not distribute work evenly down the page. Someone looking for an emergency plumber in Bromley or a garage in Dartford picks from what Google shows them first — usually a map with three businesses on it — and the overwhelming majority never scroll past that. Being eleventh is not being slightly behind. It is being invisible, and it pays exactly the same as being unlisted.
What makes this leak different from the other three is that it compounds against you. The firms at the top get more calls, which means more finished jobs, which means more reviews, which is one of the things that keeps them at the top. Every month you sit at eleven, the gap widens slightly.
Reviews are the lever, and they are not luck
Most trades we meet have done hundreds of good jobs and have eleven reviews. Not because customers were unhappy, but because nobody ever asked them. A satisfied customer will almost always leave a review if you ask at the right moment — the day after the job, by text, with a direct link that takes two taps.
Asked systematically rather than occasionally, a trade doing a handful of jobs a week can add several reviews a month indefinitely. That is the single fastest thing most local businesses can do to move up, and it costs nothing but a message that sends itself.
The rest of it
- Your Google Business Profile — properly categorised, correct hours, service area set to the towns you actually cover, and photographs added regularly rather than once in 2021.
- Pages for the places you work. A page about the specific service in the specific town beats a single page listing twenty areas in the footer.
- Consistent details everywhere. Same business name, address format and phone number across every directory listing.
- A site that loads fast on a phone, because that is where nearly all of these searches happen, often on bad signal.
This is the slowest of the four leaks to close — expect months, not weeks — which is precisely why it is worth starting before you need it.