Local SEO: attract more customers in your area

Every day thousands of people in Alicante, Benidorm, Torrevieja and across the Costa Blanca search Google for local businesses: "restaurant near me", "plumber in Alicante", "English dentist Costa Blanca". Local SEO is what makes your business show up in those results.

This guide explains how local SEO works and how to appear in the top results when nearby customers are looking for your services.

What local SEO actually is

It is not a different trick from traditional SEO. It is SEO applied to searches with geographic intent: the person searching wants a provider they can realistically reach.

That changes what Google needs to see. Ranking the homepage is no longer enough: location, service area and contact information need to be consistent across the whole site.

The three factors that matter most

1. A complete, consistent business profile

Keep your Google Business Profile accurate: name, address, phone, category, opening hours and photos. Any mismatch between what you put there and what is on your website creates distrust, for the user and for the search engine.

2. Pages with genuine local content

A generic page about "plumbing services" competes with thousands. A page that explains the service in terms specific to the area competes with far fewer.

• Name the towns or districts you actually cover.
• Include real examples of work in the area, without inventing details.
• Answer the questions local customers actually ask.
• Add time zone, language and payment options where they are relevant.

3. Local links and mentions

References from trade directories, local press and supplier websites count for more than a large number of generic links. Consistency of name and address matters more than quantity.

Measuring the result

Set up call and direction tracking. For a local business, calls and visits are usually a more useful indicator than session count.

Review monthly which terms you rank for in your area. If the page appears but nobody clicks, the problem is usually the title and description rather than the ranking.