Last Updated on September 8, 2026
Ask most business owners how they plan to get found online and the answer involves doing more of something. More posts, more ads, another platform, a rebrand. The effort is real and the intentions are good, but when you ask their new customers how they actually found them, the answer is usually a recommendation from a friend, or a Google search that turned up decent reviews.
That gap is worth sitting with, because it tells you where the money is being wasted. A lot of businesses try to get seen before they have made themselves easy to find and easy to check. They reach for reach before the plumbing is in place.
Getting found is a stack of small, unglamorous decisions that most people skip because none of them feel exciting on their own. So rather than give you our opinion, we went and gathered advice from people who work on this every day: UK marketers and agencies, the trade bodies your customers trust, and the platforms and official sources that decide whether you turn up at all. Sixty tips, every one attributed and linked, so you can read the original if you want to.
We have grouped them the way we think about growth at Whito. Start covers the foundations. Build is about doing the right things consistently. Scale is where you add the more advanced stuff. Work through them roughly in that order, and if your foundations are shaky, stay in the Start sections until they are not. Structure before scale, as ever.
Start: get the foundations right
Your Google Business Profile is doing more selling than your website
For anyone with local customers, the profile that shows up in Google’s map and local results is often the first and only impression. It is worth more attention than most owners give it.
1. Fill in every field, and get them right.
Google ranks local results on relevance, distance and prominence, and it openly favours businesses that hand it a complete, accurate picture. Every blank field is a search you might have matched and did not. There is also no way to pay your way up the local results, so a finished profile is simply the price of entry.
Source: Google Business Profile Help
2. Verify the profile so Google knows you exist.
Verification is how Google confirms you are allowed to represent the business, and an unclaimed or unverified listing is one of the most common reasons a perfectly real company stays invisible on the map. If you have never been through the verification step, that is the first thing to fix.
Source: Google Business Profile Help
3. Choose the most specific primary category you can.
Simran Rana at the UK agency Get-Found recommends picking the most specific category that describes you rather than the broadest one, and points out that a “dental practice” and a “dentist” can rank very differently for the same search. If your rankings have stalled, changing the primary category is one of the quickest experiments you can run.
Source: Simran Rana, Get-Found
4. Add the relevant secondary categories too.
When BrightLocal, a UK local search firm, studied more than a thousand locations, the businesses using four extra categories had the best average map ranking and those using none had the worst. Your primary category is the headline; the secondary ones fill in the rest of what you do so you appear for more of what people actually search.
Source: Sammy Paget, BrightLocal
5. Use the Products and Services sections properly.
These are not decoration. They give Google specific services to match against searches, and filling them in can trigger the small “Provides” notes that appear under your listing. Describe what you do in the words a customer would use, and keep it plain.
Source: Levi Williams-Clucas, BrightLocal
6. Post about one thing at a time.
Joy Hawkins, who runs the local SEO agency Sterling Sky, has found that a Google Post about a single topic tends to do better than one long post that lists everything you offer. Treat each one as the answer to a single question rather than a monthly round-up.
Source: Joy Hawkins, via BrightLocal
7. Stop spending time on things that do not move the needle.
BrightLocal’s read of the annual Local Search Ranking Factors survey suggests several popular habits do very little for local rank: geo-tagging your photos, cramming keywords into review replies, stuffing the business description, and fretting over how often you post. Those hours are better spent getting your categories right and asking for reviews.
Source: Rosie Murphy, BrightLocal
8. Fill in your attributes and answer questions in advance.
The UK agency Bespoke Digital suggests adding attributes such as wheelchair access and parking, and using the Q&A section to answer the questions people commonly ask before they have to ask them. These small details widen your appeal and clear away the doubts that stop someone calling.
Source: Bespoke Digital
A complete, verified, sensibly categorised profile is the highest-return job on this whole list. If you only do one thing this week, do this one.
Make it easy to check that you are a real business
Finding you is only half of it. Before someone hands over money or lets you into their home, they want to confirm you are legitimate, so the easier you make that, the more of them go through with it.
9. Keep your name, address and phone number identical wherever they appear.
BrightLocal explains that consistent details across many listings tell Google that what it knows about you is correct, while mismatches do the reverse and put people off. Go through your website, Google, Bing, Yell, your social profiles and any trade directories and line the details up. Small formatting differences are fine; a different phone number or an old address is not.
Source: Stephanie Newton, BrightLocal
10. Make it obvious who is behind the business.
Google has said trust is the most important thing it looks for in content, and it checks whether visitors can easily tell who produced what they are reading. A proper About page, named people and clear contact details all feed into that, and they reassure a human just as much as an algorithm. Anonymous businesses feel like a risk.
Source: Google Search Central
11. If you work in a trade, show your accreditation and invite people to check it.
NICEIC, the electrical registration body, makes the point that unsafe electrics look exactly like safe ones, which is the whole reason an independent register exists: it proves something a customer cannot see for themselves. Display the badge, and tell people they can look you up on the official register. The invitation to check is itself reassuring.
Source: NICEIC
12. Gas engineers, put your Gas Safe registration where people can see it.
The Gas Safe Register tells the public plainly that if an engineer cannot show a valid ID card, they should not let them do the work, so that is the level of proof your customers have been taught to expect. Showing your registration and mentioning the card removes a genuine worry before it turns into a reason to hesitate.
Source: Gas Safe Register
13. Get vetted by a checked-trader scheme.
Checkatrade runs up to a dozen checks on the tradespeople it lists, from ID and qualifications through to financial and CCJ checks, and keeps monitoring members after they join. For a nervous homeowner, “vetted by a scheme that checks this stuff” carries more weight than anything you could say about yourself.
Source: Alex Peters, Checkatrade
14. Join an accredited trade federation if your trade has one.
The National Federation of Roofing Contractors vets its members before they join and again every three years, with site inspections and insurance checks along the way. That kind of membership tells customers you are checked and re-checked rather than simply self-declared, which is a meaningful difference to someone comparing quotes.
Source: NFRC
15. Aim for a government-endorsed scheme where you qualify.
TrustMark describes itself as the only Government Endorsed Quality Scheme in the UK, with vetted members providing at least a two-year guarantee on work around the home and access to dispute resolution if something goes wrong. An endorsement paired with a guarantee answers the “what if it goes wrong” question before a customer has to raise it.
Source: TrustMark
16. List your business in the directories that matter for your trade.
Yell Business suggests getting your site into relevant online directories as a sensible starting point for visibility, including trade-specific ones like Checkatrade and TrustATrader. Pick the handful your customers actually use, keep the details identical to everywhere else, and do not bother scattering yourself across fifty sites with inconsistent information.
Source: Yell Business
Most of this matters in the half-minute after someone finds you, while they are working out whether to trust you. Make the proof easy to find and more of them go ahead and call.
Build a website that search engines can actually read
You do not need an award-winning website. You need one a search engine can crawl, understand and display. These are the plumbing jobs that decide whether you show up.
17. Give every page its own descriptive title, and never leave one as “Home”.
Google’s own guidance, as reported by Search Engine Journal, is to write a unique title for each page, keep it concise, and avoid vague labels like “Home”. Your titles are often the first words a searcher reads about you, so “Emergency boiler repair in Leeds” earns its place where “Home” tells nobody anything.
Source: Matt G. Southern, Search Engine Journal
18. Keep those titles to roughly 50 to 60 characters.
Ahrefs recommends staying in that range so Google is less likely to cut your title off in the results, where a chopped-off title looks careless. Put the words that matter, including what you do and where you do it, towards the front in case the end gets trimmed.
Source: Joshua Hardwick, Ahrefs
19. Use real words in your web addresses.
Google’s starter guide recommends descriptive URLs built from words relevant to the page rather than strings of random characters, partly because parts of the address can show in the results and help people judge relevance before they click. A URL ending in bathroom-fitting-bristol does a small job of selling the page before anyone clicks. A string of numbers does no work at all.
Source: Google Search Central
20. Use one clear H1 and descriptive subheadings.
Ahrefs advises wrapping your main page title in a single H1 and writing subheadings that clearly describe what follows, so search engines can follow the structure of the page. Headings are how both a machine and a skim-reading human work out what a page is about, so they are worth getting right.
Source: Joshua Hardwick, Ahrefs
21. Link to your important pages from your existing ones.
One of the simplest wins in SEO, and one that is entirely in your hands, is to search your own site for pages that already mention a topic and add links from them to the page you want to rank. Ahrefs recommends exactly this. Your best pages should not sit off on their own with nothing pointing at them.
Source: Joshua Hardwick, Ahrefs
22. Write link text that means something, and keep key pages shallow.
Shaun Anderson of the UK agency Hobo Web recommends brief but meaningful link text that makes sense read on its own, avoiding “click here”, and keeping important pages within about three clicks of your main entry pages. If a customer has to dig five levels down to find your core service, most give up long before they get there.
Source: Shaun Anderson, Hobo Web
23. Hit the Core Web Vitals thresholds.
Brian Dean of Backlinko lays out Google’s targets: largest contentful paint under 2.5 seconds, interaction to next paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and cumulative layout shift under 0.1. The usual fixes are better hosting, fewer third-party scripts, and reserving space so the page does not jump around while it loads. A slow page loses the customer before your offer has even appeared.
Source: Brian Dean, Backlinko
24. Make sure your mobile site shows the same content as the desktop one.
Google indexes the mobile version of your site, and its guidance is explicit that the mobile site should carry the same content as the desktop one. Hiding text, links or structured data on smaller screens can cost you rankings, and since most of your customers are on a phone anyway, the mobile version is the one that counts.
Source: Google Search Central
25. Keep your sitemap tidy.
Eloise Andrews of the UK agency Impression recommends including only indexable pages in your XML sitemap, with no redirected URLs and nothing set to noindex, and referencing the sitemap in your robots.txt so search engines know where to look. A clean sitemap tells Google exactly which pages matter; a messy one sends it chasing dead ends.
Source: Eloise Andrews, Impression
There is nothing glamorous in that section, which is rather the point. The businesses that get found have usually just done the dull technical basics their competitors could not be bothered with.
Build: do the right things consistently
Write for what your customers are actually searching
Content is where most businesses burn the most time, usually because they write for themselves, or for a keyword, instead of for the person typing a real question into a search box.
26. Look at the actual results before you write anything.
Suzannah Page of the UK agency Impression recommends checking what already ranks for a term by hand, and mining tools like AnswerThePublic and AlsoAsked, along with the “People also ask” boxes, to see the real questions people type. The results page is a free brief that tells you what Google already believes the answer should look like.
Source: Suzannah Page, Impression
27. Write for people first.
Google’s helpful content guidance boils down to one question: after reading your page, will someone feel they have learned enough to do the thing they came to do? Content that mostly rehashes what others have already said, adding nothing, is exactly what Google tries to filter out, so the honest test is whether you would be glad to have found the page yourself.
Source: Google Search Central
28. Match the intent behind the search.
Ahrefs frames this as the “three Cs”: the content type, format and angle that already dominate the top results for a query. If everyone ranking for a term has published a short checklist and you turn up with a three-thousand-word essay, it will struggle however good it is. Give searchers the format they are plainly already choosing.
Source: Mateusz Makosiewicz, Ahrefs
29. Blog about things with real demand and real commercial value.
Si Quan Ong of Ahrefs points out that ranking with blog posts is no longer about cramming in keywords. Choose topics that people search for and that could bring in a customer, then cover the subtopics your competitors already rank for. Give every post a job to do before you start writing it.
Source: Si Quan Ong, Ahrefs
30. Give every service its own page.
Michael Gregory of Gregory Digital in Greater London argues that a single page listing everything you do is a weak page that ranks for nothing, because it makes all your services compete for the same attention. Separate pages let each one target a single search and act as another way into your site, so five services should mean five pages and five chances to be found.
Source: Michael Gregory, Gregory Digital
31. Build location pages around genuine local detail.
Melissa Popp of BrightLocal warns against copying one page and swapping the town name in and out. Real location pages carry real local detail, whether that is local conditions, local rules or local case studies. Her example is a plumber mentioning the older homes and galvanised pipes common in a particular area, the kind of specific that reads as authentic rather than churned out.
Source: Melissa Popp, BrightLocal
32. Spell out how you serve each area.
Alex Lindley of Semrush makes the related point that each location page needs its own content, tailored to that place and explaining exactly how you serve customers there. Naming the neighbourhoods, the local landmarks and the jobs you regularly do in that area is what makes a page believable, where generic reassurance ranks for nothing and convinces nobody.
Source: Alex Lindley, Semrush
33. Do not let your own pages compete with each other.
Writing on Search Engine Land, Dayna Lucio warns against turning multiple locations into near-identical pages that end up fighting each other for the same search. Her advice is to keep broad educational content in one central place and reserve the local pages for genuinely local things like testimonials, team bios and community links, so your effort adds up instead of splitting in two.
Source: Dayna Lucio, Search Engine Land
34. Base your keyword choices on why people search, not just how many.
Andrew Holland of the UK agency JBH argues that keyword research should map to real customer needs across the buying journey, finding terms you can realistically rank for that lead somewhere commercially, rather than chasing every high-volume phrase. A hundred visitors who are ready to buy are worth more than ten thousand who never will.
Source: Andrew Holland, JBH via Search Engine Land
35. Cover a topic properly rather than in one thin post.
Adam Tanguay, writing on Search Engine Land, describes the pillar-and-cluster approach: one main page on a broad topic, supported by focused pages for each stage of the customer’s journey. Covering a subject thoroughly is one of the clearer ways to show you know your trade, which is what eventually makes you the obvious choice.
Source: Adam Tanguay, Search Engine Land
The thread running through all of that is simple. Stop writing for yourself and start answering the questions your customers already type. Read the results page before you write, and it will usually tell you what the page needs to be.
Reviews are word of mouth, made public
Word of mouth never went away. It moved online and became visible to everyone. Reviews now help people find you and decide whether to trust you, and they are increasingly what AI tools read before recommending anyone.
36. Just ask, with a link or a QR code, and never pay for reviews.
Google’s guidance is to remind customers to leave a review using a direct link or a QR code, and to respond when they do. It also flatly bans offering discounts or freebies in return, which can get your profile restricted. Most happy customers will leave a review if you make it easy and simply ask; most will never think to do it unprompted.
Source: Google Business Profile Help
37. Treat 4.5 stars as the number to protect.
BrightLocal’s 2026 consumer research found that nearly a third of people now refuse to use a business rated below 4.5 stars, a big jump on the year before. Your rating works as a filter, and below a certain point a lot of customers rule you out before they have read a single word about you.
Source: Rosie Murphy, BrightLocal
38. Keep a steady flow of fresh reviews coming in.
The same research found that most people look for reviews from the last three months, and a growing share want them from the last couple of weeks. A wall of five-star reviews from two years ago tends to read as “used to be good”, whereas a regular trickle reads as “still busy, still good”.
Source: Rosie Murphy, BrightLocal
39. Reply to every review, and write like a human.
BrightLocal found that most people prefer businesses that respond to every review, and that around half are put off by generic, copy-and-paste replies. A templated response is arguably worse than none, so write a sentence that could only have been written about that particular customer.
Source: Rosie Murphy, BrightLocal
40. Handle bad reviews calmly, and take the detail offline.
Google’s advice for a negative review is to reply promptly, acknowledge the problem honestly, apologise with some empathy, never share personal information or attack the reviewer, and move anything complicated to a private channel. Remember that you are writing less for the angry reviewer than for every future customer who reads how you handled it.
Source: Google Business Profile Help
41. Ask regularly, not just once.
A Simply Business guide, citing Trustpilot, notes that businesses which keep inviting customers to review them tend to score higher, because reviewing works like a habit on both sides. Building the request into the end of every job means it happens automatically rather than whenever you happen to remember.
Source: Simply Business
42. Think of reviews as fuel for AI recommendations, not just human ones.
BrightLocal’s research points to a sharp rise in people using AI tools to find local businesses, and among those users almost all cross-check the AI’s suggestion against real reviews before buying. Myles Anderson, the firm’s chief executive, describes the customer journey as far more fragmented than it used to be. Strong, genuine reviews now do double duty, convincing the person and backing up whatever an AI has said about you.
Source: Myles Anderson, BrightLocal
43. Reply quickly to unfair reviews, for the benefit of everyone else.
The UK entrepreneur Nigel Botterill, quoted in Forbes, advises replying swiftly to false reviews, not to win the argument with the person who wrote it but for everyone who reads it later. A calm, factual reply under an unfair review usually does more good than the review itself does harm, whereas silence can look like an admission.
Source: Nigel Botterill, via Forbes
44. Do not expect Google stars from reviews you host yourself.
Google’s documentation is clear that when a business controls the reviews about itself, those pages are not eligible for the star snippets you see in search results. Embedding your own testimonials will not put gold stars next to your listing, so it pays to collect reviews on the platforms customers already use, where the praise carries more weight with people and with Google alike.
Source: Google Search Central
If there is one trust asset worth building relentlessly, it is this. Ask consistently, reply to all of them, and treat a steady flow of reviews as part of the job rather than an afterthought.
Scale: add the advanced stuff
Getting recommended by AI
AI answers are becoming a new front page for a lot of searches, and the encouraging news for a business is that there is far less trickery involved than the people selling “AEO packages” would like you to believe.
45. Rank in the top 10 the normal way first.
A Search Engine Land guide notes that AI Overviews overwhelmingly draw their citations from pages that already rank well, and cites research finding that a large share of those citations come from results already on the first page. There is no separate AI league table to sneak into. Solid, ordinary SEO is still what gets you cited.
Source: Curtis Weyant, Search Engine Land
46. Treat AI optimisation as SEO, and ignore the “AI hacks”.
Google’s own guidance says you do not need special files, extra schema, content chopped into little chunks or AI-specific rewrites to show up in generative search, and that the advice is the same as it has always been: unique, people-first content on pages that can be crawled. Before you pay for anything sold as “AEO” or “GEO”, it is worth checking whether it is just good SEO wearing a new label and a higher price.
Source: Google Search Central
47. Take Google at its word that this is still SEO.
Search Engine Journal, reporting Google’s guidance, quotes the company directly: optimising for generative AI search is optimising for the search experience, and is therefore still SEO. The things Google says to ignore include special files, tiny content chunks and inauthentic mentions. This is the reassuring bit, because it means you do not have a new discipline to learn, only the old one to do properly.
Source: Matt G. Southern, Search Engine Journal
48. Build a presence on YouTube.
When Ahrefs studied around 75,000 brands, YouTube presence turned out to be the single strongest thing they measured that lined up with visibility in AI tools. You do not have to become a video personality. A handful of useful clips that show your work and answer common questions builds the sort of presence these tools pick up on.
Source: Louise Linehan, Ahrefs
49. Get mentioned, not just linked to.
The same Ahrefs research found that being mentioned around the web, even without a link back, lined up with AI visibility far more strongly than raw backlink counts did. Getting your name talked about in local press, on relevant sites and in genuine community discussions now matters in its own right, which is a slightly different game from the old link chase.
Source: Louise Linehan, Ahrefs
50. Turn up where your customers already talk.
A Semrush study found that community sites like Reddit, and reference sites like Wikipedia, get cited by AI tools more often than most company websites do. That is not an invitation to spam forums; it is a reason to answer real questions honestly in the places your customers already gather, which tends to pay off in ways that are hard to fake.
Source: Carlos Silva, Semrush
51. Keep your important pages current.
Ahrefs, looking at millions of citations, found that AI tools tend to cite noticeably fresher content than traditional search does, so pages that have not been touched in years are less likely to be picked up. It is worth revisiting your main pages now and then, because a recent, updated page beats one that has sat untouched since launch.
Source: Ryan Law, Ahrefs
52. Do not add schema markup purely to chase AI citations.
A controlled test by Ahrefs, reported in Search Engine Journal, found that adding schema markup produced no meaningful lift in AI citations. Schema is still worth having for the normal rich results in search, but not as an AI shortcut, and the wider lesson is a useful one: test the claims before you spend on them, because a lot of “AI-ready” advice does not survive contact with the data.
Source: Matt G. Southern, Search Engine Journal
53. Track brand mentions inside AI answers.
The international SEO consultant Aleyda Solis, speaking at an event in Manchester, suggests shifting how you measure success towards brand mentions and citations inside AI answers, and keeping an eye on which tools cite you, since they each pull from different sources. If AI is starting to send you customers, it is worth noticing when and where you get named.
Source: Aleyda Solis
54. Make sure your content works without JavaScript.
Solis also points out that some AI tools do not run JavaScript, so anything that only appears after scripts have loaded can be invisible to them, and server-side rendering helps make sure your words are readable to them. A simple question for your developer settles it: if we turn JavaScript off, is the important text still there? If not, some tools will never see it.
Source: Aleyda Solis
For all the noise around it, getting recommended by AI is mostly good SEO done consistently, plus a real presence off your own site. Anyone selling you a secret is selling the fundamentals back to you at a markup.
Measure what actually brings in the work
You can do everything above and still waste money if you cannot tell which parts are working. This is where a lot of businesses fly blind, and where a little discipline pays back fastest.
55. Test every metric with one blunt question.
Shane Robinson of the UK agency Straightforward suggests asking whether, if a number doubled tomorrow, it would noticeably change your business. If the answer is no, it is a vanity metric. He reframes the whole exercise from “how many people clicked” to “how many of those clicks turned into real enquiries, and why”. Likes and impressions feel good; enquiries pay wages.
Source: Shane Robinson, Straightforward Agency
56. Pick one or two sources of truth and stick to them.
Charlotte Khor of the UK agency Zero Above advises against spreading your measurement thin, and recommends settling on a small number of reliable sources, for instance Google Analytics for traffic and your CRM for leads and sales, then basing decisions on those. Two numbers you check every week will do more for you than ten dashboards you never open.
Source: Charlotte Khor, Zero Above
57. Remember that referrals are still your best source.
LOCALiQ’s business research reports that almost two thirds of businesses say customer referrals are their best source of new customers, and that people spend more with businesses that reliably respond to reviews. All the digital work in this article serves an older truth, which is that a happy customer telling a friend is still the most valuable marketing you have, so make it easy for them.
Source: LOCALiQ
58. When you ask for a referral, ask for a specific introduction.
The referral specialist Bill Cates, quoted in a Vistaprint guide written for UK businesses, advises dropping the vague “who do you know that I could help” in favour of suggesting an introduction to a particular person, and doing it just after you have exceeded expectations. “Do you know anyone?” tends to get a shrug, whereas “would you introduce me to your neighbour who mentioned their leaking roof” tends to get an answer.
Source: Bill Cates, via Vistaprint
59. Use more channels only when they are the right ones, and check which bring enquiries.
Constant Contact’s research across the UK and other markets found that while most businesses agree using several channels helps, only a small minority feel confident they have picked the right ones. Their chief marketing officer observes that owners are usually far more passionate about their product than their marketing. The aim is to be on the channels that bring in enquiries, and the only way to know which those are is to measure before you spend more.
Source: Sarah Jordan, Constant Contact
60. On social, judge yourself by engagement and clicks, and caption your videos.
The UK agency Carlos Alba Media recommends prioritising the metrics that actually shape your strategy, such as engagement rate and clicks through to your site, over follower count, and adding captions to videos because a large majority are watched with the sound off. A follower count does not pay any bills, so keep your eye on the clicks through to your site and the enquiries that land in your inbox.
Source: Carlos Alba Media
Measurement is not admin work to put off. It is how you stop pouring money into things that do not pay back, so settle on a couple of numbers that track real enquiries, watch them, and let them decide where your effort goes next.
The one thing to take from all this
Getting found online is less about doing more and more about doing the right things in a sensible order. Get the basics findable and checkable first. Once those hold, get consistent with your website, your content and your reviews. The AI visibility and the proper measurement can wait until the rest is steady. That, in the end, is all that Start, Build and Scale really means.
If your foundations are weak, no amount of clever work on top will hold them up. And if your foundations are strong, you will often find you need far fewer tactics than you feared.
So pick three tips from the Start sections and do them this week. That alone will move you further than another year of posting into the void.
Not sure which stage you are at? Whito’s free visibility check tells you in a few minutes where your marketing is solid and where it is leaking money, so you know which of these 60 tips to start with. Take the Visibility Check.
A note on sources: every tip above comes from a named UK marketer, agency or trade body, or from an authoritative platform or official source that UK businesses are found on, including Google’s own documentation and widely cited industry research. Where a figure comes from a study rather than UK-specific data, we have described it as research rather than a hard UK fact. The links go to the original source so you can read the full context. Advice has been paraphrased for brevity rather than quoted, except where a source’s own words are used deliberately.
