Three Website Settings That Decide Whether Local Customers Find You

A roofer in Preston rang us last month. He had a website. It looked fine. His phone number was on it. His services were listed. He had been trading for six years and had a solid reputation. But when he searched for "roofers Preston" on Google, his business was nowhere. Not on page one. Not on page two. Not on the map.

His website was not broken. It just had the wrong settings.

Three settings, to be specific. Three fields that he had never touched because nobody told him they existed. They are not hidden deep in code. They are not technical. They are not expensive to fix. But get them wrong, and Google has no idea who you are, what you do, or where you do it.

Here are the three settings that decide whether local customers find you. And exactly what to do about each one.

Setting one: your page title

Open your website right now. Look at the tab at the top of your browser. That text you see there. That is your page title. It is the single most important line of text on your entire website for getting found on Google.

When someone searches for "electrician Blackburn," Google scans the page titles of every website it knows about. If your page title says "Home" or "Welcome" or just your business name with nothing else, Google has no reason to show you. It does not know you are an electrician. It does not know you work in Blackburn.

A page title that works for local SEO tells Google three things in one line: what you do, where you do it, and who you are. Something like "Electrician Blackburn | D Smith Electrical Services" is a thousand times better than "D Smith Electrical Services" on its own.

The "what" and the "where" go first because those are the words people type into Google. Your business name goes last because the person searching does not know your name yet. They are looking for an electrician, not you specifically.

Where to find this setting: If your site runs on WordPress, look for an SEO plugin like Yoast or Rank Math. There will be a field labelled "SEO title" or "Page title." If your site was built for you by a developer, ask them where the page title field lives. If you built it yourself on Wix or Squarespace, look under "SEO settings" in the page editor. Every platform has this field somewhere. It is always editable. It is never locked.

What to type: Your main service, your town or area, a separator like a vertical bar or dash, then your business name. Keep it under 60 characters. If you serve multiple areas, pick the biggest one for your homepage and use individual pages for the others.

Setting two: your meta description

Underneath every Google search result is a short paragraph of text. That paragraph is called the meta description. It does not directly affect your ranking. But it directly affects whether someone clicks on you or the business above you.

If your meta description is blank, Google will pull a random sentence from your website. Usually the first sentence. Sometimes a sentence about your office opening hours or your cookie policy. That is what potential customers see when they decide whether to click. It is the digital equivalent of a shop window with a half-peeled poster in it.

A good meta description is short, specific, and tells the person exactly what you do and why they should pick you. Something like: "Qualified electrician in Blackburn. 24-hour callouts, free quotes, 15 years trading. Fully insured and NICEIC registered. Call today."

That is two sentences. It tells them what you do, where you are, what makes you different, and what to do next. It fits in the space Google gives you. And it reads like a human wrote it, not a keyword-stuffing robot.

Where to find this setting: Same place as the page title. In WordPress, it is right underneath the title field in the SEO plugin. On Wix or Squarespace, it is in the SEO settings panel. If your site builder does not give you a meta description field, ask your developer to add one. It takes five minutes.

What to type: Your main service, your location, one thing that makes you different from competitors, and what the person should do next. Keep it under 155 characters. Write it for a human being who is scanning search results on their phone, not for a search engine.

Setting three: your Google Business Profile primary category

This one lives outside your website. And it is the setting most business owners get wrong without ever realising.

Your Google Business Profile has a field called "primary category." It is a dropdown menu. You pick the thing that best describes your business. And Google uses that category to decide whether to show you when someone searches for your type of service.

The mistake most people make is picking something too broad. They pick "Builder" when they should pick "House Builder." They pick "Cleaner" when they should pick "Commercial Cleaning Service." They pick "Electrician" when they should pick "Electrical Installation Service."

The difference matters enormously. Google has hundreds of specific categories. The more specific you are, the more relevant your profile looks to Google when someone searches for exactly what you do.

A decorator who picks "Painter" competes with artists, industrial painters, and car painters. A decorator who picks "Painter and Decorator" competes only with other painters and decorators. The pool is smaller. The relevance is higher. The chances of showing up are better.

Where to find this setting: Log into your Google Business Profile. Click "Edit profile." Look for the "Category" section. Your primary category is the first one listed. You can also add secondary categories, but the primary one is what Google weights most heavily.

What to type: Do not guess. Google provides a predefined list. Start typing what you do and see what options appear. Pick the most specific one that accurately describes your main service. If you run a roofing company that also does guttering, your primary category is "Roofing Contractor," not "Gutter Cleaning Service." Pick the thing you do most and charge the most for. You can add the secondary thing as an additional category.

Three settings. Twenty minutes. No cost.

None of these settings require a developer. None of them cost anything. None of them take more than a few minutes each. Together, they tell Google the three things it needs to know to show your business to local customers: what you do, where you do it, and which searches you should appear in.

The roofer from Preston fixed all three in under half an hour. He rang us two weeks later. A woman in Fulwood had searched "roof repair Preston," found him on the first page, and booked a full re-roof. That single job was worth more than his website, his domain, and his hosting combined. All because three fields that had said the wrong thing now said the right thing.

Go and check yours right now. Open your website. Look at the tab. Read what it says. Then open your Google Business Profile and check your primary category. If either one is blank, vague, or wrong, you now know exactly what to type.