Local SEO for small business: what to fix first, with data from 1,056 local websites

Local SEO for a small business means showing up when people nearby search for what you sell: in Google's map results, in the regular results below them, and in the answers AI assistants give. Google ranks local results mainly by relevance, distance and prominence, so your Google Business Profile and your reviews come first, then your website. Of the 716 local business websites we could fully check in six Canadian cities in October 2026, 61% had pages without a description and 47% didn't describe the business for search engines.

Where local customers find you

Local searches often show a map above the regular results: 18 of the 22 renovation searches we track for a client in Oakville did. AI assistants now answer the same questions. On October 11, 2026, we asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Perplexity to recommend a business for 11 trades in six cities, and recorded what each of the 614 answers cited:

Assistant	Answers citing Google Maps	Answers citing a local business's own website
Gemini	77%	18%
Google AI Mode	70%	16%
ChatGPT	47%	80%
Perplexity	0%	48%

So the same two things decide most of it: your Business Profile, which feeds the map and Google's assistants, and your website, which ChatGPT and Perplexity read. The full data is in our study of local business websites and AI recommendations.

1. Complete your Google Business Profile

Claim your profile, then fill in everything a customer would check: your main and extra categories, services, service area or address, hours, photos and your website address. Keep the name as it is in real life: Google's guidelines say your name should reflect your business's real-world name, and that including unnecessary information in it isn't permitted.

Then make your business name, address and phone number match everywhere they appear: your website, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect and the directories your trade uses. Check the website link on your profile and in those listings too. In our sample, 162 of the 1,056 businesses (15%) had a listed website on a domain that no longer works.

2. Get reviews the right way

Google says your review count and review score factor into local search ranking, and AI assistants cite review sites. Ask every customer after the job, by email, text or a card with a link. Google's policy doesn't allow businesses to selectively solicit positive reviews or to offer incentives such as payment, discounts or free services for them, and in the US, the FTC's rule bans buying fake reviews.

Which review sites matter depends on your trade. These are the review sites and lists the four assistants cited most often in our Canadian test, out of about 56 answers per trade:

Trade	Cited most often
Roofers	HomeStars 27%, the Better Business Bureau 23%
Renovation contractors	Houzz 30%, HomeStars 16%
Electricians	HomeStars 18%, TrustAnalytica 11%
Heating and cooling	the Better Business Bureau 15%, ThreeBestRated 11%
Plumbers	the Better Business Bureau 11%, HomeStars 7%
Dentists	Opencare 9%, Birdeye 7%
Physio and chiro clinics	ClinicFinder 16%, Yelp 9%
Law firms	Best Law Firms 11%
Accountants	ThreeBestRated 11%, TrustAnalytica 9%
Auto repair	Reddit 13%, TrustAnalytica 13%
Hair salons and barbers	TrustAnalytica 13%, Fresha 13%

Outside Canada the sites differ. To find yours, ask an AI assistant the question your customers ask, with your town in it, and note which sites it links.

3. Fix your website's basics

Of the 716 sites in our random sample that we could fully check, these are the shares that failed each basic:

Basic	Sites missing it
Service details in structured data	85%
Page descriptions	61%
A main heading (H1) on each page	51%
Business details in structured data	47%
Unique page titles	34%
A sitemap	14%
A redirect to the secure (HTTPS) address	13%

Give each service its own page, and say on it which towns you serve. Write location pages only for places you really work from or serve: Google treats pages targeted at specific cities or regions that funnel users to one page as doorway abuse. Our guide to what an SEO score measures covers the rest of these checks.

4. Make your pages load fast on phones

Google's guidance is that the main content should appear within 2.5 seconds, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads. On Google's slow-4G phone test, the median homepage in our sample took 7.6 seconds, and 95% of the 770 homepages we measured took longer than 2.5 seconds. That test is stricter than most real visits: among the 11% of sites with enough visitors for Google to publish real-visitor data, 52% met the 2.5-second mark. Start with the top of your homepage: the test times the largest image or block of text visible when the page opens.

5. Let AI search crawlers in

Only 2 of the 716 sites blocked a crawler AI assistants use while answering, so this is rarely the problem, but check your robots.txt file. OpenAI recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot so your site can appear in ChatGPT's search results. Our guide to ChatGPT SEO covers what else ChatGPT looks at.

Can you do local SEO yourself?

Mostly, yes. Your Business Profile, reviews and listings need your own account and your customers, so they are yours to run anyway. The website basics above are mostly short edits to titles, text and settings. Help is most useful for the technical fixes, writing service pages and measuring what changed.

How much does local SEO cost for a small business?

Doing it yourself costs your time. If you pay for help, ask what is included and how results are measured. As one published example, Connu's SEO plans are CA$599 one time for the website setup, delivered within 2 weeks, and CA$299 a month for a new page and a monthly check of rankings and AI answers. Work on your Business Profile and reviews isn't in either plan: we show you what to change, and you do it from your own account.

What to do next

Check your profile and listings, then your website. Connu's free SEO score checker runs the 25 website checks from this study in under a minute and lists what to fix first.