How to Get More Customers for Your Local Business

A quiet week. Then another. Meanwhile the business down the road seems to get every call, and your inbox is full of advice: post more, try TikTok, run an offer, get on page one. Very little of it tells you where your own customers are slipping away.

Often the answer isn’t more tactics. Every new customer takes the same short path, and fixing the weakest step on it usually does more than adding something new at the start. This guide walks through each step, the rules from Google, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) that apply along the way, and what to do first.

The five steps every customer takes

1. They find you. On Google, on the map, in an AI tool, on social media or through someone they know.
2. They choose you. They compare you with the others and decide you look like the safe bet.
3. They get in touch. They ring, fill in a form, message or walk in, and someone answers.
4. They come back and send others. The job goes well, you stay in touch properly, and they tell a friend.
5. You measure it. You know which of the above is working, so you can do more of it.

A leak anywhere on that path costs you customers you’ll never hear about. Being found by more people doesn’t help if they don’t pick you, and a great reputation doesn’t help if the phone goes to a full voicemail.

Find your weakest link

This is our rule of thumb, not an official test. Pick the row that sounds most like you and start there.

Step	A sign it’s your weak link	Go to
Found	People who need you say they’d never heard of you, or you don’t appear when you search for your own service and town	Be found
Chosen	People find you but go elsewhere; your reviews are few, old or unanswered	Be chosen
Contact	You get visits or profile views but few enquiries, or you keep missing calls	Make contact easy
Keep and refer	Customers are happy but rarely come back or send anyone	Keep customers
Measure	You can’t say where last month’s work came from	Measure

1. Be found

Your Google Business Profile

Your Google Business Profile is the free listing that shows your business on Google Maps and in the local results, the map and short list of businesses Google shows when someone searches for a service nearby. In our view, it’s the first thing a local firm should get right.

Google’s tips on local ranking are plain: “Businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results.” The same page says a verified profile is more likely to appear. The basics are:

• Verify it, so you control it and can reply to reviews.
• Fill it in completely and accurately: category, services, address or service area, phone number and website. Google’s help page on editing your profile shows where each field lives.
• Set your hours, including special hours. Google lists “business hours, including special opening hours” among the details to provide. Special hours cover bank holidays and one-off closures, and Google suggests confirming your hours for official holidays even if they’re the same as usual. A profile that says you’re open when you’re not is a quick way to annoy someone who drove over.

If you visit customers rather than having them visit you, the rules on addresses and service areas are different. Our guide to setting up a Google Business Profile covers that, plus the mistakes that get profiles suspended.

One thing to know before anyone tries to sell you a shortcut. That same Google page says: “There’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.” It says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity, which it also calls prominence. We explain what each of those means in practice in how the Google 3-pack works.

Paid ads are a separate route; whether to use them before, after or instead of SEO is covered in SEO vs PPC.

A website with a page for each thing you do

Your website is where people check you properly. As a rule, give each main service its own page, and add area pages only where you have something genuinely local to say. Thin copies of the same page with a different town name swapped in can fall foul of Google’s rules. Our guide to service and location pages shows how to plan them without that problem. If you’re in the trades, our local SEO checklist for tradespeople adds registrations and trade-specific points.

AI tools

AI search summaries are the short answers that tools such as Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT write in response to a question, sometimes naming local businesses. In Ofcom’s Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes Report 2026, 75% of UK online adults said they read these summaries at least some of the time, and 42% said they read them “often” or “always”.

You don’t need a separate trick for them. Google says there are “no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary”, and its best practices include keeping your Business Profile information up to date. OpenAI says ChatGPT can use location information to find local results, and also that its “Search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated, or incorrect.” So check what these tools say about you, and fix the sources they can see. If a rival keeps getting named instead of you, read why ChatGPT recommends your competitor.

Social media and word of mouth

Which social platform matters depends on who your customers are. Ofcom’s Online Nation 2025 found Facebook and Messenger were used by 93% of UK online adults in May 2025. Its 2026 adults’ report adds that Facebook is more popular with social media users aged 75 and over (81%) than with those aged 16 to 24 (55%). A kitchen fitter selling to older homeowners has different priorities from a café that wants students. Whatever you use, point it back to your own website (Facebook Page vs website explains why).

Word of mouth matters too, but we found no reliable UK figures on how much local work it brings, so we won’t quote one. Step 4 covers encouraging it within the rules.

2. Be chosen

Once people find you, they compare you with the others. Your profile and website are where you can tip that.

Reviews. Google’s local ranking tips say “more reviews and positive ratings can help your business’s local ranking”, and reviews are something a stranger can read before deciding. Three rules keep you on the right side of Google and UK law:

• Ask every customer, not just the happy ones. Google’s Maps content policy bans businesses from trying to “selectively solicit positive reviews from customers”. The CMA’s fake reviews guidance (CMA208), published on 4 April 2025, treats “encouraging just those who are satisfied to leave reviews” as a form of cherry-picking that may break the law.
• Never offer anything in return for a Google review. Google’s tips on getting reviews say offering discounts or free goods or services for reviews “is considered fake engagement and is strictly prohibited”. UK law allows some incentives if they’re disclosed, but Google’s rule is stricter, so on Google the answer is simply no.
• Don’t fake them, buy them or write them for customers. The UK ban on fake reviews, under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, has been in force since 6 April 2025.

Reply to reviews, good and bad. Google’s review tips also say to be professional, keep it short, and “Respond in a timely manner”. They give no deadline in hours, whatever you may have read. Our guide on how to get more Google reviews covers your review link, QR codes, what to say and how to handle bad reviews.

Photos that show the real thing. Google says photos help complete your profile and make it more attractive to customers. Its photo guidelines ask for images that are in focus and well lit, without heavy filters: “the image should represent reality”. Your own van, premises, team and finished work beat stock photos. Google lists photos in its ranking tips as a way to show customers what you offer, but doesn’t say they lift your position. Add them for the people deciding.

A website that answers the obvious questions. What you do, where you work, roughly what it costs or how pricing works, and how to book. It should load quickly and be easy to use on a phone; check it on yours. If your site can’t do that, our web design service builds sites that clients own outright, domain included. If you’re weighing up options first, see how much a website costs in the UK.

3. Make contact easy

This step feels like admin, so it’s easy to overlook. We found no official UK data on how many enquiries a missed call or broken form costs, so treat this list as our advice.

• Make your number tappable on every page, so a phone user can ring you in one tap.
• Keep forms short. Name, phone or email, what they need. Every extra box is a reason to give up.
• Test your own form. Send yourself an enquiry every few months and check it arrives. Forms break quietly.
• Answer, or call back quickly. If you can’t pick up on a job, make sure your voicemail isn’t full and that you return calls the same day where you can.
• Show your hours, on your website and your profile, and keep them the same in both places. If you work by appointment only, Google’s profile guidelines say not to list opening hours, so say “by appointment” clearly on your site instead.

Here’s a made-up example. An electrician near Worcester has a good profile and plenty of reviews, but their contact form has been emailing an old address for months. The leak is at step 3, and more advertising would only pour more people into it.

For the detailed version, see how to turn more website visitors into enquiries. Our free website health check walks you through ten checks, including sending a test enquiry.

4. Keep customers and get referrals

Customers you already have know your work, so staying in touch is worth doing. It’s also the step where UK marketing rules apply most directly.

Marketing to past customers: the soft opt-in

Under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR), you usually need someone’s specific consent before you send them marketing by email or text. The ICO says the same rule covers texts, voicemails and social media direct messages. There’s a limited exception for your own customers, often called the soft opt-in. In the ICO’s direct marketing guidance, it applies only when all of these are true:

1. You got their details directly from them.
2. You got them during a sale, or while negotiating one. The ICO gives asking for a quote as an example, which matters for trades.
3. You’re marketing your own similar products or services.
4. You gave them a clear, simple way to opt out when you collected their details.
5. You give a simple, free way to opt out in every message.

It doesn’t cover bought-in lists or new contacts who’ve never dealt with you. One caution: the ICO’s PECR guidance currently carries a notice that, because of the Data (Use and Access) Act, it “is under review and may be subject to change”. Check the ICO’s pages before you plan a campaign, and take proper advice if you’re unsure.

Service messages aren’t marketing, until you add an offer

Appointment reminders, booking confirmations and messages checking someone’s contact details are service messages, not direct marketing. But the ICO says that if a service message includes elements of direct marketing, it counts as direct marketing, even if that isn’t its main purpose. For example, “Your MOT is due on Tuesday” is a reminder. “Your MOT is due, and here’s 10% off a service” is marketing, and needs the soft opt-in or consent.

Keep review requests neutral and free of offers too. The ICO pages we read don’t say whether a review request counts as marketing, so the safe course is a plain request with nothing attached.

Refer a friend, done right

Referrals are word of mouth you’ve asked for, and the simplest form is also the safest: ask happy customers to pass on your number, your card or your website. Two versions cause problems. If you encourage, incentivise or ask customers to forward your marketing, the ICO treats you as instigating it, so PECR still applies and you may need the friends’ consent. And on asking customers for their friends’ contact details so you can market to them, the ICO’s PECR guide says: “We would therefore advise against this type of viral marketing.”

If you thank people for referrals, keep that completely separate from reviews.

5. Measure what’s working

You don’t need analytics software to start. Keep an enquiry log, a simple list of every enquiry with how they said they found you, and ask every caller “How did you hear about us?” After a couple of months, you’ll know which of the steps above is bringing work in and which is leaking. Our guide to tracking where your enquiries come from sets up the log and then adds Google’s free tools, and Google Search Console for beginners shows which searches bring people to your website.

Be patient with the results. Some fixes, like correcting your hours, show as soon as Google accepts the edit. Others, like building up reviews or improving your website, take longer, and nobody can honestly promise a date; how long SEO takes explains why.

Where to start

This is our suggested order. If you already know your weakest step, start there instead.

If you’ve got an hour:

• Search for your service and town on your phone. Do you appear, and is your profile correct?
• Check your profile hours, and add special hours for the next bank holiday.
• Send yourself a test enquiry through your website and ring your own number.
• Reply to any reviews you haven’t answered yet.

If you’ve got a week:

• Fill in every section of your Business Profile and add a few real photos.
• Get your review link and start asking every customer, in the same neutral words.
• Start an enquiry log and ask every caller how they found you.

If you’ve got a month:

• Make sure each main service has its own clear page on your website.
• Check your contact list against the soft opt-in rules before you send any marketing.
• Look back at your enquiry log and put more effort into what’s working.

Where Get Found fits

Get Found is a local SEO, AI SEO and web design agency with 22 years’ experience, based at 39 Foregate Street in Worcester with an office in Stockport. We work with businesses across the UK, with no long contracts. If you’d rather hand the work over, that’s what our local SEO service is for.