A local search checklist for Baldwin County businesses.
When someone in Foley types “plumber near me” or someone visiting Gulf Shores searches “breakfast,” a handful of boring, free things decide whether you show up. Most of them take an afternoon. None of them require an “SEO package.”
You don’t need to understand how Google works. You need Google to understand three things about you: what you do, where you do it, and that you’re real. Everything on this list serves one of those.
Start here: your Google Business Profile
This is the listing that appears in the map results, with your hours, photos and reviews. It matters more than your website for “near me” searches, and it’s free.
- Claim it at business.google.com if you haven’t. Verify it; Google will mail a postcard or ask for a video.
- Pick the right primary category, the most specific one that fits (“HVAC contractor,” not “Contractor”).
- Fill in everything. Hours, including holidays. Phone. Website. Services. A short description written like a person.
- Add real photos. The storefront, the truck, the team, the work. Ten is a good start. Phone photos are fine.
- Ask for reviews, and reply to every one, including the grumpy ones. A calm, kind reply to a bad review is read by far more people than the review itself.
Then: make your website say where you are
Search engines can only connect you to Baldwin County if your website actually mentions it. Oddly, lots of local sites never do.
- Put your town in your page titles. “Dog Grooming in Daphne, AL | Your Business” beats “Home | Your Business.”
- Name your service area in plain words, on the homepage and the contact page: “Serving Fairhope, Daphne, Spanish Fort and the Eastern Shore.”
- Match your name, address and phone exactly to your Google profile. Same spelling, same suite number, same phone format.
- Give each main service its own page. A page called “Water heater repair” can show up for “water heater repair Foley.” A paragraph buried on the homepage can’t.
Then: prove you’re real and worth it
- Make sure your site works on a phone. Google ranks the mobile version of your site, and most of your searchers are on one.
- Make it fast. Resize giant photos before uploading. Remove plugins you don’t use. If you don’t know how, ask whoever built the site.
- Get listed where locals look. The local chamber of commerce, Nextdoor, and any directory that’s specific to your trade. Keep the details identical everywhere.
- Add a little structured data. This is a bit of code that labels your business name, address, hours and type for search engines. Your web designer should include it by default. Ours does.
What not to bother with
- Keyword stuffing. Writing “Fairhope” fourteen times on one page reads badly to humans and doesn’t help with Google.
- Paying for “guaranteed #1 rankings.” Nobody can guarantee that. Anyone who does is guessing with your money.
- A separate page for every nearby town with the same text and the town name swapped. Google sees through it, and so do customers.
The afternoon plan
- Claim and complete your Google Business Profile (60 minutes).
- Upload ten real photos and ask three happy customers for a review (30 minutes).
- Rewrite your homepage title and add your service area to the homepage and contact page (30 minutes).
- Check your site on your phone on mobile data. Note anything slow, tiny or broken (15 minutes).
- Make a list of your main services that don’t have their own page yet. That’s your next project.
Do those five things and you’ll be ahead of most small businesses in the county. Not because it’s hard, but because almost nobody does it.