SEO and local SEO services in London, Ontario

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For a local business in London, Ontario, the map results are decided mostly by your Google Business Profile, not your website. The website's job is to back the profile up with a page per service, details that match exactly, and content specific enough that answer engines can quote it.

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Your Google Maps profile comes first, and it is free

When someone searches for an electrician near them, Google says local results depend mainly on relevance, distance and prominence: how well your Business Profile matches the search, how far you are from the person searching, and how well known your business is (the line that introduces the three now calls the last one popularity). Google says there is no way to pay for a better position among the unpaid map results. Listings marked Sponsored are ads.

So the order of work is: claim and complete the profile, get the categories and service areas right, then make the website agree with it. Doing that in the other order is how businesses end up with a nice site and no calls.

This part costs nothing and you can do it yourself. The free site audit checks whether your website matches your Business Profile, and you get the results whether or not you hire me.

What the SEO work is, and what it costs

Local SEO is included in every website I build, from $499 to $1,399 one-time with free hosting: a page for each service you offer, your details written to match your Business Profile, structured data for the business and its services, and the site submitted to Google and Bing.

After launch it is optional. The Care Plus plan at $99 a month adds a Google Business Profile post every month and a new service or area page every quarter, on top of an hour of edits. For a site built somewhere else, the free site audit comes first, and any repair is quoted after it.

Your name, address and phone number have to agree everywhere

Keep your name, address and phone number the same on your site, your Business Profile and the directories that list you. Google generally treats small formatting differences such as “Suite 4” and “Ste 4”, or “Street” and “St”, as the same address, according to local SEO firm Whitespark, but a wrong phone number or an old address sends customers to the wrong place.

The free site audit checks that your site matches your Business Profile, and on a Care plan I update hours, prices and details within 2 business days when they change.

Reviews are the part nobody can do for you

Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking, and the businesses that get them ask in person while they are still standing in the driveway. A card, a text with a link, and a reply to every review, good or bad.

I will not write reviews, buy reviews or put invented star ratings into your site's markup. That is the fastest route to a suspended profile, and it is the sort of thing that gets found.

What changes now that people ask an assistant instead

A growing share of “who should I call” questions are typed into an assistant rather than a search box. Google's AI answers draw on Business Profiles, according to Google. ChatGPT's search uses OpenAI's own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, and sometimes sends queries to partner search providers; OpenAI lists Microsoft among them and names Bing directly for its Enterprise and Edu plans. Both read the text on your site.

The pages on this site open with a plain answer, use specific numbers and show when they were last reviewed, because that helps the reader and gives any search engine a clear passage to show. Google says you do not need to write in a special way for its AI features. I write the copy for every site I build from our call, and you review it before launch.

Where your effort goes, in order

Do this	Why it comes first
Claim the Google Business Profile	Free, and it decides the map results
Fix the primary category	Google says the category affects your local ranking
List the towns you actually serve (up to 20, within about 2 hours' drive)	It shows customers where you work. Testing suggests it does not change where you rank
Ask every customer for a review	Google names reviews as part of local ranking
Build a page per service	Gives the profile something to point at
Keep hours and prices current	Out-of-date beats missing, but only just

Questions people ask

Are you an SEO company or an agency?

Neither, quite. YXU Studio is one person in London, Ontario, so the person who does your SEO is the one you talk to. There are no account managers and no long contract: local SEO comes with every website, and the monthly plan is optional.

Do you sell a monthly SEO package?

No. The Care Plus plan is $99 a month and includes up to an hour of edits, one Google Business Profile post a month and a new service or area page each quarter. That is maintenance, not a retainer, and it is optional.

How long before a new site shows up on Google?

Pages are usually indexed within days of launch, but the position keeps moving for weeks. Map results can move faster than that, because they mostly follow the profile rather than the site.

Can you guarantee first place on Google?

No, and neither can anyone else. Nobody controls Google's ranking, so a guarantee is either a coincidence being sold in advance or a very narrow search nobody makes. What is controllable is speed, structure, accuracy and reviews.

Should I build a page for every neighbourhood?

No. A place earns its own page only when people there search for what you do and you have something specific to say about working there. Near-identical pages with the place name swapped are a known spam pattern that can drag the whole site down, so one honest service-area page naming the rest works better.

What is local SEO?

Local SEO is getting found by nearby people searching for what you do, like “plumber London Ontario”. Google says local results depend mainly on relevance, distance and prominence: how well your Business Profile matches the search, how far you are from the person searching, and how well known your business is. You cannot change distance, so the work goes into the other two.