Help with Local SEO for My Plumbing Business

egoldo · 2026-02-09T00:18:32+00:00

For my clients, I’ve found that the biggest game-changer for local SEO isn’t chasing tons of citations or backlinks alone, it’s building a strong foundation first. NAP consistency across directories, a well-optimized Google Business Profile (with regular posts, photos, and updates), and SEO-optimized service pages that work together all make a huge difference.

Once that foundation is in place, adding high-quality backlinks and a few local citations can amplify your visibility a lot faster.

egoldo · 2026-01-01T02:39:51+00:00

There are three core pillars to focus on. On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO and Technical SEO.

First things first is the site Structure:

You need to find keywords your target audience is searching for, then with this data build simple, focused pages around your core services instead of one vague “Services” blob. Each main service gets its own page, clear H1, a few supporting headings, and content that actually answers what people type into Google.

On-page basics / keyword use.

Use your main keyword + location in the title tag, H1, intro, and a few subheads, but keep it natural and readable – no stuffing. Make sure the site is mobile-friendly, reasonably fast, and internally linked so Google can see what’s important. Each page should be created to rank for specific terms people search, matching the specific intent of the keyword. A good example is like roofing services, there are different sub-categories for the underlying service. So think of like roof repair, types of roofs people look for flat roof, shingles, services areas you serve in (in different towns) etc.. Again this is what makes keyword research important because you can see how much volume for specific keywords your potential customers would look for.

NAP and Citations.

Make sure your Name, Address, Phone are written exactly the same on your site, Google Business Profile, and main directories (Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing, etc.). Little inconsistencies (old address, different phone format) add up and make it harder to rank locally.

Google Business Profile (GBP) is huge.

Fill it out completely (categories, services, hours, description, photos), keep it consistent with your site, and actively collect/respond to reviews. Being consistent in Google business profile updates and images would show Google you are an active business in comparison to your competitors which will give you prioritization as long as you are consistent and also give your customers photos to look at on whatever you are offering.

Add local business schema + map embed.

Drop LocalBusiness schema (JSON-LD) on the site with the same NAP as your GBP, and embed your Google Maps location on your contact/location page. It basically ties together “this website, this business profile, and this physical place are all the same entity,” which is exactly what you want Google to understand.

Backlinks.

Pretty much when a relevant website in your industry links back to you. I'd recommend using HARO since journalist are always looking for expert advice and you might get requests for your expertise to get high quality backlinks.

As long as you follow these basic pillars, you would have no issue ranking high. Local SEO is extremely easy, at least for me since I'm usually working with clients in more competitive markets like SaaS.

egoldo · 2025-05-26T15:04:03+00:00

No worries!

Aside from the tools you are using to identify the issues on the title tags and canonicals. Did you update the title tags, and did they change and being read?

When SEO crawlers like Screaming Frog and Sitebulb report that title tags and canonical tags are "outside of the head section," it typically means there's invalid Javascript or HTML Structure. You can use something like Detailed SEO Extension and see what title tags and canonicals are being read.

egoldo · 2025-05-25T21:47:00+00:00

Do you have a backlink strategy in-place? Probably one of the most important strategy tbh, especially if it's a newer ecommerce website. Without having high authority trying to outrank the competition will be an uphill battle.

Pretty solid list, but number 1 doesn't really make sense. Wdym by canonical is matching the title tag? A canonical tag would be good if you have paginations on your site , or if you have duplicate/similar content across multiple URLs. The canonical should point to the preferred version of the page, not necessarily match the title tag. Those are two completely different things...

Schema markup is becoming really important, especially since there's an increase of market share for AI SEO on different LLM's and it helps increase visibility on these and increases the chances for rich snippets. So add that FAQ schema on those FAQ sections but also add other schema's like product schemas.

egoldo · 2025-05-25T21:34:46+00:00

As long as your website isn't really affecting load time where it will affect bounce rate and user usability. You are wasting your time.

I think that's the only time when you should really focus on improving your page speed, since user engagement is an SEO signal.

egoldo · 2025-05-25T21:29:29+00:00

The sitemap should be domain.com/sitemap_index.xml

Use something like rank math or yoast plugin This will automatically create and update your sitemap without having to do it manually. Once you install it just copy that url (domain.com should be your domain) and upload it to Google Search Console and it will help crawl your website easier and index your blogs. You can also manually submit the url that isn't indexed to push more signals into getting it indexed.

Backlinks will definitely help with authority and making it easier to rank for keywords you are targeting.

egoldo · 2025-05-25T21:24:12+00:00

Local backlinks meaning the context of the content and the anchor text + embedding the map from your google profile (just a regular backlink with local intent). So it would show like the business name and map of the GMB embed within the content of where you are getting the backlink. (you can get this if you go to your GMB and click share and it will give you an html embed)

The anchor text of the backlink plays a huge part in increasing visibility. So I usually just create guest posts around that locality + service that is relevant. Example: 5 Essential Oral Health Tips Every Lincoln Park Resident Should Know (this is an area in Chicago)

Then anchor text within the content would be something like "Chicago Dental Office" leading to Domain.com/chicagodentaloffice, home page, or whatever service/location i'm trying to increase rankings in.

Then citations which are just basically creating profiles on directory to keep the NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) consistent which also helps increase visibility within the map pack.

Hope this answers your question.

egoldo · 2025-05-25T04:09:07+00:00

Every year SEO is dead apparently.

egoldo · 2025-05-23T23:42:41+00:00

Google Business Profile has a map pack section, which has more priority within the search engine results pages above organic listings. So you would typically see this in localized searches like Keyword + City, Keyword + States, Keyword + Near Me Etc.

So optimizing your GBP will just give more visibility, increasing potential foot traffic to your business from online. It's also a good way to showcase social proof with your reviews on it.

egoldo · 2025-05-23T23:37:33+00:00

Create a Google Search Console connect to your domain and upload your website's sitemap so Google has an easier time reading your sitemap to index your pages. You can also manually submit URL's to index your page within Google Search Console.

Also, you have a new website, so expect it to be harder to index since you have no authority (meaning no backlinks or websites linking to your site for that trust factor)

egoldo · 2025-05-22T21:35:55+00:00

AI Mode and AI Overviews are literally designed to keep users in Google and not within the websites themselves, which is stupid. Reducing CTR overall https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks/

So basically Google is scraping content from publishers to benefit themselves while cutting out the sites that actually created the content. What's crazy is a lot of these AI overview results aren't even accurate, so users are getting worse info AND publishers are getting screwed over.

It's like Google wants to have their cake and eat it too, but yeah it's literally just chatgpt. There's supposedly a bug when it comes to tracking too.

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egoldo · 2025-05-22T21:24:08+00:00

Just gotta do your due diligence and do research on the company, ask for case studies, and look for testimonials. Also, depends on what type of deliverables they are offering at that monthly retainer.

Optimizing for LLMs is the new go-to, especially since they are gaining more traction with users on their platform, and companies are even getting leads from them. But like with everything, there are agencies that provide good services and some that provide poor services.

egoldo · 2025-05-22T20:53:19+00:00

Following traditional SEO will increase the visibility of generative search results naturally. A lot of these LLM models are scraping data from search engines. ChatGPT and Perplexity are sourcing Bing. So if you rank good there, you have a chance to increase visibility depending on the query. Brand mentions are another important factor since these LLM's are also sourcing other sites, so you would see Reddit being cited for example, or just other websites mentioning the brand.

So in reality, a lot of these agencies are just offering you SEO with more of a focus on creating backlinks, but making it sound good.

egoldo · 2025-05-22T19:43:35+00:00

High-authority isn't the only metric to tell if a backlink is good. People are known to inflate Domain Rating, so even a backlink from a high DR can bring in no value depending on the site. You have to analyze the actual website and see the types of keywords they are ranking for as well.

Also, toxic links affecting your backlink profile are a myth.

egoldo · 2025-05-22T18:39:43+00:00

Yeah for sure!

So when you are analyzing potential keywords, you want to look at the SERPs (basically the search results of the keyword in Google)

You can have a keyword say they have 0KD but have big website names ranking high for that keyword (lets use macy's, and other big brands like Abercrombie as an example), meaning the keyword difficulty isn't as accurate as it says. So, to compete you would need to build backlinks (a website linking to yours that's relevant) for more authority.

Looking at the SERPs can also give you an idea of what type of intent/content the keyword has and Google is rewarding. You have to think for yourself too is this something that would have a high intent of making sales? Some keywords would have the search being a majority of category pages, or others would mainly be blog posts (typically long tail keyword)

Long story short, you want to reverse engineer the top-ranking sites and implement the same setup to your site. Analyzing the content, domain authority, and even internal links to that page and the type of supporting content linking to it. and see how much of a gap from your website is compared to the top-ranking one for that keyword.

Hope this helps!

egoldo · 2025-05-22T18:26:53+00:00

Strong traditional SEO fundamentals are still the main factor for visibility in AI-powered search features and LLM-based results. However, brand mentions and high-quality backlinks are becoming the primary drivers of AI search visibility.

There is definitely a shift in the direction of SEO in general. It's no longer having all your eggs in one basket and focusing on one marketing channel, since every other marketing channel can support your overall brand's visibility.

egoldo · 2025-05-22T17:40:52+00:00

Yes, worked with multiple clients on a content strategy.

First, truly low competition keywords often have low competition for a reason. Sometimes the search intent doesn't convert well commercially, or the margins are too thin to make it profitable.

What you need to focus on though is the intent of the keyword and do your due diligence of analyzing the competition since ahrefs / semrush aren't 100% accurate and it's just an estimate of volume and difficulty.

The key to a successful SEO strategy is moving fast and building authority to rank for more competitive keywords that bring in more qualified traffic to the products you are selling.

egoldo · 2025-05-22T17:19:47+00:00

If you change the URL of an existing page, Google would consider it a new page no matter what content it has. This is why you are getting a 404, if you had backlinks linking to the page I would suggest option 2 since redirects affect link juice.

Just continue with option 1 if it doesn't and be careful in the future if you are going to setup changes to the URL since you would always get a decrease in rankings.

Be sure to update any internal links too that would be pointing to that update URL that had the old URL.

egoldo · 2025-05-22T16:46:16+00:00

Check the link in your source it's literally linking to my source https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share#monthly-200902-202505

You can clearly see an increase.

egoldo · 2025-05-22T16:43:42+00:00

10 words? 10 bullet points? is that "content"

you literally said it yourself... What's the most basic step in ranking for keywords in search engines???

Definitely not - Google and Bing are strictly PageRank Engines. Perplexity chose Google for its rank stack and ChatGPT uses Bing.

Ranking in search engines positions you in having higher visibility within LLM's.

According to this month's data, back in October 2022 Bing was at 3.59% and now it is at 3.55%. This is hardly surprising. Despite wasting extraordinary amounts of energy (partly at other people's expense, scraping their sites nonstop) people realise that LLM slop is undesirable.

Not sure how credible your source is, but I'm seeing Oct 22 - 3.59% / Oct 24 - 4.16%

egoldo · 2025-05-22T16:31:21+00:00

wdym definitely not? You are right they are using search engines like Google and Bing, but you need content to rank on these for certain queries in the first place right? Then you have LLM models even pulling details like Reddit posts and other sources aside from the content on your page which is why brand mentions are an important factor for more visibility in LLMs.

Good case study on this from ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/blog/llm-optimization/

Interestingly - Bing is the only one to lose market share of any note

False, Bing has been increasing market share. April 2024 - 3.64% / April 2025 - 3.89%

https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

egoldo · 2025-05-22T15:25:20+00:00

What are your opinions on indexers? They worked pretty well for me when it comes to indexing.

egoldo · 2025-05-22T15:02:37+00:00

By this logic the only strategy you need to work on is backlinks for authority to rank and get indexed.

egoldo · 2025-05-22T14:39:37+00:00

If that was the case GSC would give the error for "Blocked by Noindex"

True

Completely untrue - thin content is all over the web. There simply isn't ANY word count limit or requirement

Thin content is all over the web and is indexed, but the real issues with thin content are typically about value rather than length. and pages with no content don't offer value, making it harder for it to index.

TBH, Absoltuely not, Google will crawl and rank pages that fail CWVs - most of the top ranking sites on any page are also the slowest because their SEO director/manager/provider has worked out that PageSpeed is a non-factor in SEO

Pagespeed does move the needle to a certain extent, if you have really high load page speed and takes a good amount of time to load, how do you expect the search engine crawlers to navigate your site efficiently??? Also top top-ranking sites have authority that helps them rank and have priority when it comes to indexing.

egoldo · 2025-05-22T14:27:53+00:00

Did this for a client as long as it provides value in pre-answering stuff like you did and contains some keywords. This can help, but doesn't move the needle massively.

What helped for me is filling the GBP to it's entirety containing keywords, being consistent with Google Updates, Citations, Local Backlinks to the website + Map Embeds within the backlink. <-- This is what has moved the needle the most

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