How to improve local SEO on a WordPress website

Write down the exact business name, address, phone number, website URL, opening hours, primary category, services, and areas served. Compare these details with your Google Business Profile, contact page, header, footer, social profiles, and important directory listings.

Correct obvious differences before changing anything else. Google says local results are mainly influenced by relevance, distance, and prominence, and complete, accurate Business Profile information helps it match a business to relevant searches.

Verify the profile, choose the most accurate primary category, add secondary categories where appropriate, write a factual description, upload current photographs, and keep your hours updated. Ask genuine customers for reviews and reply to them without copying the same response every time.

Do not create extra profiles for the same location or add keywords to the business name unless they are part of the real-world name. A website cannot compensate for an incomplete or suspended Business Profile.

Create one strong page for each main service and, where justified, a location page for each real branch or meaningful service area. Include what you do, who you help, the areas you cover, how customers contact you, relevant qualifications, photographs of genuine work, and locally relevant examples.

Do not duplicate one template across dozens of towns by changing only the place name. Thin or near-identical location pages give visitors little value and can leave your site with many weak URLs. Link each service page to the relevant location or contact page using descriptive link text.

Give every important page a clear, unique title and main heading that describe the service and location naturally. For example, use a title such as Emergency boiler repair in Leeds | Business name only when that page genuinely provides emergency boiler repair in Leeds.

Link from the home page, navigation, service pages, and useful articles to your priority pages. Google uses page titles and headings as sources for title links, while descriptive internal links help people and search engines understand the destination.

Add accurate LocalBusiness structured data to a page that visibly contains the business information, normally your contact or location page. Include the real business name and address, and add suitable details such as phone number, opening hours, URL, image, and geographic coordinates where available. Use the most specific business subtype that genuinely fits.

You can add JSON-LD manually or use an SEO plugin. Test it with Google's Rich Results Test and URL Inspection. The common Friday-afternoon failure is duplicate or outdated schema from the theme and two SEO plugins; use one source of truth, then check the page source and validation results after changing your details. Structured data can help Google understand a page, but it does not guarantee a rich result or higher rankings.

For a small, single-location site, the manual route is often enough: keep one accurate contact page, maintain your Business Profile, publish genuinely useful local content, and add schema only once. You do not need a plugin merely to put a town name in a page title.

If you manage several locations, update opening hours often, or do not want to maintain JSON-LD by hand, use AIOSEO Local Business. It provides fields for local business schema, contact details, hours, meta information, and local SEO guidance in WordPress. Configure the business details once, check that it is not duplicating markup from another plugin or theme, then validate the resulting pages.