Local maintenance service providers meet the needs of local communities. Business owners and employees often work and live in the area they provide HVAC, plumbing, carpet cleaning, etc. service to. Also, businesses’ employ locally and make most of the needed business purchases… yep on the local market.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) describes the ability to provide tools, structure, content, and a bit more to search engines like Google. Then the search engine uses this to crawl, analyze, rank, and categorize the information on your website. This improves a clients ability to find you. As a result, good SEO gets you found.
Now for the challenge, this is a moving target. There is a lot of history here, probably a write up for another day. The short of it is search engines want websites optimized. A search engines’ purpose is to serve up the best most relevant information to those searching. To do so, engines track and rate website on a multitude of criteria. Then those websites that perform well and offer the searcher what they are looking for receive a higher rank and get served up more frequently in results.
What search engines don’t want are practices that are unethical or manipulative. Examples of dangerous tactics include false/inaccurate data on the business location, keyword stuffing, irresponsible link building, and so much more. These tactics, whether innocent errors or intentional abuse can and will often be penalized. It is best to play by Google’s and Bing’s rules gaining trust and avoiding penalties. Again the challenge, these rules keep changing.