5 Local SEO Tips to Rank Higher in South Wales

If you fit kitchens in Caerphilly or cut hair in Cowbridge, almost nobody finds you by typing your company name. They type what they need and where they are, then they tap one of the first few businesses on the map. Getting into that short list is local SEO, and most of it is unglamorous admin rather than anything technical.

Here are the five things we work through for every client, in the order that usually pays back fastest. You can do all of them yourself.

1. Treat your Google Business Profile as your real shopfront

For a local business this matters more than the website for the first click. It is free, it takes an afternoon to do properly, and most of your competitors have half filled it in and forgotten about it.

• Get the name, address and phone number exactly right, and keep that wording identical everywhere else online.
• Pick the most specific primary category you can. Emergency plumber beats plumber, which beats contractor.
• Set your service areas to the towns you genuinely cover rather than the whole of South Wales.
• Add real photos of your work, your van and your team. Replace them every few months.
• Post an update every week or two. A finished job with a sentence about where it was is plenty.
• Answer the questions in the Q&A section yourself, including the awkward ones about price.

2. Make your name, address and phone number match everywhere

Google cross checks your details against the rest of the web. If you are Dai Jones Plumbing on one directory, D Jones Plumbing Ltd on another and your old mobile number is still on a third, that is three small reasons to trust you slightly less than the firm down the road.

Work through the places that actually get checked in the UK: Yell, Bing Places, Facebook, Checkatrade or TrustATrader if you are a trade, Companies House if you are a limited company, and any trade body you belong to. Fix the wording so it is character for character identical, including whether you write Street or St.

3. Build reviews into your week, not your wishlist

Reviews are the part everybody agrees matters and nobody keeps up with. The pattern that works is dull: ask every happy customer, at the moment the job finishes, with a link that takes them straight to the review box.

• Steady beats spiky. A few reviews every month for a year looks more credible than thirty in one week.
• Recent matters. A five star average from 2023 does less for you than a four point seven from last month.
• Reply to all of them, including the bad ones. A calm reply to a one star review reassures the next reader more than the review damages you.
• Never buy them or write them yourself. Fake reviews are banned under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, and the penalties sit with your business.

4. Give every town you serve a page of its own

If you want to rank for electrician Bridgend, you need a page about working in Bridgend. One contact page listing fifteen towns will not do it. But this is where most people go wrong: they copy one page fifteen times, swap the town name, and end up with fifteen pages Google treats as near duplicates and ignores.

A location page earns its place when it says something only someone who works there would know. The jobs you do most in that town, the areas you cover, how far out you travel, what the housing stock is like. Our own Wales location pages are built that way, so web design in Cardiff, Swansea and Newport each read differently rather than being the same page three times.

• Use the town in the page title, the H1 and the web address, once each, written naturally.
• Describe the work you actually do there, not a generic list of services.
• Put a phone number and a form on the page so nobody has to go hunting.
• Add a review or two from customers in that area if you have them.

5. Add local schema so Google can read your details

Schema is a small block of code that states your business details in a format search engines read directly: who you are, where you are, what you do, which areas you serve and what your opening hours are. It does not make you rank on its own, but it removes any ambiguity, and it is what makes star ratings and opening hours appear in results.

For a local business the useful types are LocalBusiness or a more specific one such as Plumber or HairSalon, plus Service for what you offer and FAQPage if you answer common questions on the page. Every site we build has this set up from the start, so it is one less thing to retrofit.

What to do first if you only have an hour

1. 1Claim and complete your Google Business Profile, including categories, service areas and six good photos.
2. 2Send a review link to the last five customers you did a good job for.
3. 3Check your phone number and address are identical on your website, your Google profile and Yell.
4. 4Write down the five towns you most want work in. Those are your first five location pages.

Everything beyond that is repetition. Local SEO rewards the business that keeps showing up, which is why our Professional plan includes Google Business Profile management and one to two blog posts a month: it is the keeping up that most small firms cannot find time for.

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