Local SEO, Edinburgh.
Local search shifts street by street, and the reasons a business isn't showing up at all are usually settled before any of that matters. I track where you rank across a grid of the city, watch what your competitors are doing, and work through what that turns up. You see the same screen I do.
What we're aiming at
Month one
An illustration of grid tracking: forty nine points across a city, one for every place the search is run, each shaded by where the business ranks standing there. It steps through four scans, the outer points moving from red towards green as visibility spreads out from the middle, and the average position falling from 11.4 to 1.7.
11.4average position
1 20+
How local visibility is meant to move: strong where you are, spreading outwards. This one shows the shape rather than a particular month, and yours is measured from the first scan.
Sound familiar.
If you're missing from the map or buried below businesses you know you're better than, those enquiries are going somewhere else. Usually to whoever is doing this work.
You appear when somebody searches your business name and nowhere else. That isn't visibility, that's a business card.
Wrong category, no services listed, three photographs from 2021. Google reads all of it, and so does the customer.
An old phone number on one directory, a previous address on another. Every mismatch chips away at how confident Google is about you.
Reviews are the single biggest lever on local ranking. A profile that stopped collecting them a year ago looks like a business that stopped trading.
No new pages, no new content, nothing telling Google you're active. Meanwhile a competitor publishes every fortnight.
Checking on your own phone tells you where you rank standing exactly there. Two streets away it can be completely different.
The bit nobody tells you.
A good build gets the foundations right, and I'd argue about that with anyone. But a site sits still. Local search doesn't.
It was right the day it went live. Then the world moved.
Google's own three. You can't move your customers closer, so the work is on the other two.
How it works.
I built the system that runs this, rather than reselling somebody else's dashboard. That matters less than what it does: it means nothing waits on me remembering.
Nothing runs on a hunch. Every job I do for you starts from something a check picked up, and you can see which check, and when.
The detail.
Read the bold line if you're in a hurry. Anything marked as an add on is priced separately, so you know what you're getting before you ask.
Watches
Where you rank, street by street. Google answers differently depending on where somebody is standing, so checking once from your own phone tells you almost nothing. I check from a grid of points across your area and log every one, so you can see where you're genuinely strong and where you vanish.
Watches
Faults caught while they're small. Broken links, slow pages, missing titles, pages Google can't read properly. The quiet technical things that hold a site back and that nobody notices until something has been wrong for a year.
Watches
Who's above you, and why. "You're third" isn't useful on its own. Knowing the two above you have two hundred reviews each tells you exactly what to go and fix.
Watches
Whether the AI tools name you. Plenty of people now ask ChatGPT or Gemini for a recommendation instead of scrolling Google. I ask those tools the questions your customers would and record whether your business comes up. That's where a slice of your future enquiries is going.
Watches
Every new one, as it lands. Your rating, whether the count is climbing or has gone quiet, and a bad one flagged straight away while it's still worth answering.
Acts
Your facts, spelled out in code. Behind your site sits a block that states exactly who you are in a format built for machines: name, address, hours, service areas, services, people. Most sites skip it or fill it in wrong. It's the difference between hoping Google understands your business and making sure it does.
Acts Local PRO
Posts aimed at the work you want more of. A feature piece that goes deep on one job, with shorter posts around it answering the questions people ask alongside it. One article does very little alone. A run of them on the same theme is how you become the business Google treats as the expert.
Acts Local PRO
An answer to every review, in your voice. Including the awkward ones, and nothing is posted without a human reading it first. An unanswered review looks like nobody's home, and a good reply to a bad one often does more for you than the five star review next to it.
Acts Local PRO
Your details, the same everywhere. A citation is any listing that shows your name, address and phone number, the three together known as your NAP. Directories, maps, review sites, industry listings. Google uses them to confirm you're a real business at a real address, so a duplicate listing or an old phone number quietly undermines everything else. Audited, corrected, and then watched so it stays that way.
Acts
Everything found becomes a job, with the reason attached. Worked through in the order that moves the needle for you, not whatever's quickest for me. You can see what was found, what was done about it, and when.
Then one report a month pulling it together: where you rank now against last month, what got fixed, what came in, and what's next. Ten minutes and you know whether your money is working. If something isn't moving, it says so.
Grid tracking for a client in Fife. I check where they show up from dozens of points across their area, not just from one spot. Each pin is a place someone might search from, and the number is their position in the local results. A 1 means top of the map.
The bit that's changing.
Nobody has settled on a name for this yet, which tells you how new it is. The work underneath is the same question it always was: when somebody asks, does your business come up?
It's already happening to you. Plenty of people now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity for a recommendation rather than scrolling a page of results. Google puts an AI answer above its own listings. In each case somebody gets named and everyone else is invisible, and there's no second page to be on.
So I measure it. Every month I ask those tools the questions your customers would ask, in your area, and record whether your business comes up and who does instead. It's the same idea as the grid scans, pointed at a different place. You'll know month by month whether you're in the answer, rather than finding out in two years that you never were.
And I write for it. The feature posts aren't written to hit a keyword a set number of times. They're written to be the clearest answer to a real question, in language a machine can lift cleanly: a direct answer near the top, proper headings, specifics rather than adjectives, and the facts stated plainly enough to be quoted. That's what gets picked up, and it happens to be what a human reader wants too.
Your schema does the rest. These tools work from structured facts where they can find them. Having your services, areas, hours and business details spelled out in code is the difference between being understood and being guessed at.
And I can show you it working. Not a screenshot from a case study, and not something from last year. On the call I'll open one of these tools in front of you, ask it the sort of question a customer would ask, and show you a client of mine being named in the answer. You can type it yourself afterwards and check.
What I won't tell you is that anyone can guarantee a place in an AI answer. Nobody can, and the tools change monthly. What I can do is make you the most quotable business in your trade locally, show you whether it's working, and prove it's possible before you spend anything.
The rhythm.
Most of it runs whether you think about it or not. That's rather the point.
The proof.
Four clients, four positions on Google, each one screenshotted and dated on the page behind the card. Results move, so treat these as a record of that day rather than a promise about today.
"He thinks like a business partner, not just a web developer."
"He has completed one website for me & we are currently in the process of designing a second for another company of mine."
"He not only understood my brief but suggested smart additions I hadn't considered."
Plans.
Both are monthly, both include your website maintenance, and neither has a hidden setup fee.
Local Growth
£300 a month
The visibility work, running every month, on a site I look after.
Local PRO
From£500 a month
For a business in a fight it intends to win, where the work is scaled to the competition rather than to a package.
Citation management sits in Local PRO, because the work depends entirely on the mess you're starting from. Some businesses need a handful of listings corrected. Others have a decade of old addresses to unpick. On the lower plans it's a job with its own price, quoted once I've looked.
The honest bit about commitment. There's no contract for building a website. You pay for the build, you own it, and that's the end of the obligation.
Local SEO is different, and I'd rather say so plainly. A retainer runs for a minimum of twelve months, with thirty days' notice after that. It isn't a sales tactic, it's the timescale the work needs, and local SEO is never set and forget: three to six months before position moves properly, and stopping at month four means paying for a start with no finish. If that's a bigger step than you want to take yet, say so on the call. There are sensible ways to begin.
Questions.
If yours isn't here, the FAQ page covers how I work generally, and you're welcome to just ask.
Some things move quickly. Claiming and fixing a neglected Google Business Profile can show up within a few weeks. Most businesses see a real shift in position after three to six months, because Google needs time to crawl new content and verify your business across directories.
What you get from month one is visibility of your own position: where you rank across the grid, who's above you, and what's changed since last month. That starts immediately even when the rankings haven't.
No, and be wary of anyone who says they can. Google's ranking changes daily and nobody has a special relationship with it.
Here's what I do stand behind. Your site will be technically sound, faster and more relevant to local customers than it was. The work follows Google's own guidelines rather than something that works until it doesn't. And you'll be able to see exactly what was done and what moved, which is more than most people get for their money.
No. If you travel to customers, a plumber or a mobile hairdresser for instance, you set a service area on your Google Business Profile instead of an address. Plenty of my clients work that way.
It does change the tactics. Without a pin on the map, proximity works against you, so relevance and prominence have to do more of the lifting. That's exactly what the grid scans are for: they show you which parts of your service area you actually reach.
General SEO chases national rankings. If you're an accountant in Edinburgh, traffic from London does nothing for you.
Local SEO is about the map and the searches with intent behind them: somebody standing on Princes Street looking for an accountant nearby. Different ranking signals, different work, and a much better fit for a business whose customers are within driving distance.
They work as a pair. Your profile is usually what somebody sees first, in the map. Your site is where they decide whether to trust you.
And Google reads your website to work out how to rank your profile, so a weak site holds the listing back even when the listing is well managed. That's why the plans include the site as well as the profile rather than treating them as separate jobs.
Three things, and none of them need interpreting. Your position across the grid compared with last month. The actions on your Google listing: calls, direction requests, clicks through to the site. And enquiries, which is the only one that pays the bills.
The monthly report puts all three on one page. If a number went the wrong way it says so, along with what I'm doing about it.
Different names for the same job, and it's included rather than sold separately. Your visibility in those tools is tracked every month, the feature posts are written to be quotable by them, and your schema states your facts in a form they can read.
There's more detail on that further up this page.
For the plans as they stand, yes, because they include looking after the site as well as the visibility work, and I can only do that properly on something I built.
If you've got a site elsewhere and you want the local search side handled, say so on the call. It's a different conversation rather than a no, and I'd rather have it honestly than sell you a plan that half fits. Start with web design in Edinburgh if the site itself is the weak link.
I'll run a scan of your area and show you the map: where you show up, where you don't, and who's sitting above you. Ask me and I'll also show you a client being named in an AI answer, live, so you can see it rather than take my word for it. Free, and yours to keep whether you go ahead or not.
Rather have the site looked at first? Get a free website audit instead.
