If your customers search for what you do and then travel to you, or expect you to travel to them, local search is a different job from ordinary SEO. The map listing sits above everything else, how far you are from the person searching genuinely affects whether you appear, and a page that ranks nationally can be invisible three miles away.
I’m based near Liverpool and work across Merseyside, West Lancashire and Cheshire, along with clients who are nowhere near any of it. Being close by makes a meeting easy. It is not what makes the work any good, and I’d rather say that than imply otherwise.
Where I’d start in your town
I checked the search results in each of these places before writing about them, and they came back genuinely different. That matters because it changes where your money should go. In one town the sensible spend is your Google Business Profile, in another it is a single well-written page, and in a third it is neither.
Liverpool covers the city and Merseyside, where proximity and the map pack settle most local searches before anyone reaches a website.
Ormskirk is a market town with a university and a ring of villages around it, so the useful question is which of those villages actually deserves a page and which do not.
Formby turned up something odd: search for a trade there and you get the National Trust, a golf club and Wikipedia before you get any tradespeople. Your profile is carrying more of the decision than you would expect.
Crosby is the opposite. Yell and Nextdoor hold effectively all of page one, so your listings and your profile earn more than a run of new pages would.
Maghull still has room for a small local site to rank on its own merits, which makes a genuinely useful page worth paying for there.
Southport is a resort and a working town at once, and visitors deciding on the day search very differently from residents looking for a tradesperson.
Skelmersdale sits in Lancashire with a Wigan postcode, so businesses end up describing their address three different ways and quietly lose enquiries to the inconsistency.
Prescot is busier than it looks, with established competitors holding well over a hundred reviews each, so catching up takes a deliberate effort rather than a quick fix.
St Helens has a weak enough field that one properly written service page can sit above most of the directories, and there is a local firm already proving it.
Widnes is one of the few places nearby where a local firm’s own town page is beating Yell outright.
Runcorn rewards narrow pages about one service, which is why a single page covering everything you do tends to struggle there.
Further out, four towns turned up findings different enough to be worth their own pages.
Chester has a real agency market with published prices, which is unusual nearby and gives you a going rate to judge any proposal against. The visitor trade there is a separate search problem from the resident one.
Warrington is the most contested of the towns I checked. Exact-match domains hold the obvious term, so the work starts by finding the specific searches still open rather than fighting for the town name.
Northwich has Cheshire-wide agencies ranking above firms actually based in the town, which tells you what being local does and does not buy you.
Chorley returned almost nothing on the obvious search. That can mean an open field or thin demand, and the page explains how to tell which before spending anything.
If your town is not on the list, that is not a problem. It usually means I have not run the checks there yet, and I would do that as part of looking at your site rather than pointing you at a page.
Does it matter that I’m not in your town?
Not to Google, and not much to the work. Where the person doing your SEO sits is not a local ranking factor. Your business address or service area is, along with how accurately that information is published and what customers can find about you.
What does matter is whether somebody has actually looked at the results in the places your customers are. Two people searching from different parts of the same town can see different map results, so a single ranking position is a poor account of how you are doing.
Working further afield
Plenty of my work has nothing to do with the North West. I work with clients across the UK, Europe and the USA, which mostly changes the hours rather than the method. Multi-market work brings its own problem, usually two versions of a site competing with each other in search, and that is covered on the international SEO page.
What you get, wherever you are
The same person does the work throughout. The reporting says what changed and what it means, rather than restating numbers you can already see in your own account. And nothing goes out that I have not looked at myself.
Tell me what you do and where your customers come from, and I’ll look at your site and the results for your own trade. You can request a free assessment or get in touch if you’d rather talk it through first.