Exact match domains for your business: when one helps and how to run it

Exact, partial and brand domains

It helps to name the domain correctly before you judge it, because the three kinds behave differently in the real world, even if search engines treat the address itself in a similar way.

The last row is the one this tutorial builds towards. Its domain is an exact match for a search such as "drain services Leeds", but it is also the brand, because the business is called that. Everything that follows depends on which of these rows you are in.

The 2012 exact match domain update

On 28 September 2012 Matt Cutts posted that a "small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality 'exact-match' domains in search results".¹ In a follow-up the same evening he said the change affected 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree and was unrelated to Panda and Penguin, two other updates of that period.² Two details in those posts matter. The target was low-quality exact match domains, so the update did not say that a keyword domain is penalised for being one. And the figure Google gave was for English-language queries in the US at that time, so it tells you nothing about how many UK local searches were affected then or now.

Google has not published a later statement saying how it treats exact match domains today as a separate class. What it has published is general guidance on domain names, which is the better thing to plan around.

What Google's current documentation says

Google's SEO Starter Guide covers domain names directly. It says: "When picking the name of your site, do what's best for your business. Users will use this name to find you, so we recommend following general marketing best practices. From a ranking perspective, the keywords in the name of the domain (or URL path) alone have hardly any effect beyond appearing in breadcrumbs."³

Note the word "alone". The guide is talking about the address in isolation. It does not say a business name has no effect, and the next stage looks at why the name, as distinct from the address, is a different matter in local search.

The same guide says the top-level domain, the ending such as .co.uk or .com, "only matters if you're targeting a specific country's users, and even then it's usually a low impact signal."³ For a UK business the ending is mainly a question of what customers expect, which comes up again when you score a domain in stage 4.

The two running examples

Halden Plumbing is a family firm in Leeds with three vans, a website at haldenplumbing.co.uk, a verified Business Profile with a few dozen reviews, and its name painted on the vans. A domain broker has emailed offering leedsplumber.co.uk for a four-figure sum, with the line that it will "put you at the top of Google for plumber Leeds".

The second example has no name yet. A drainage engineer with years of experience at a larger firm is setting up on his own in Leeds, with one van, a small yard he rents, and no reviews. He likes the idea of trading as Leeds Drain Services and has checked that leedsdrainservices.co.uk is unregistered. Each stage applies the work to both, because the right answer for one is close to the wrong answer for the other.

Local search runs on records about businesses: who they are, where they are, what they do, and what other people say about them. The name is the field that ties those records together. That is why a keyword name behaves differently from a keyword domain, and why it only works when the name is real.

The business entity record

Think of the business as one entity with many records describing it. The root record is the legal one. For a limited company that is the name registered at Companies House, for example Leeds Drain Services Ltd. For a sole trader it is their own name plus any business name they trade under, which GOV.UK says must appear alongside their own name on official paperwork such as invoices and letters.⁴ Every other record should carry the same name:

• Signs, vans, uniforms, invoices and quotes. A limited company must display its name at its registered address and wherever it operates (home-based businesses are exempt from the sign), and its website and business letters must show the registered number, the registered office address, where it is registered, and that it is a limited company.⁵
• The Google Business Profile. The name should reflect your business's real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website and stationery and as known to customers.⁶ Enter it exactly as it appears on your real-world signage, stationery and other branding.⁷
• The domain and the name shown on the website: in the header, the page titles, the footer and the contact page.
• Structured data on the website. In Organization markup, the name property is the organisation's name, legalName is the registered legal name where it differs, url helps Google uniquely identify the organisation, and sameAs points to pages on other sites with more information about it. The markup can help Google tell your organisation apart from others in search results.⁸
• Bing Places, Apple Business and the directories: the same name, address and phone number.
• Reviews, where customers refer to the business by the name they know it by.
• Links from other sites, which usually use the business name as the link text.

When the name in all of these records is Leeds Drain Services, they describe one business with one name. When the van says Halden Plumbing and the website says Leeds Plumber, they describe two names that may or may not be the same firm.

Relevance: the name matches the search

Local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, and relevance is how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for.⁹ When the real name of a business is Leeds Drain Services, a search for "drain services Leeds" contains every word of the name. The profile's name field, its category and its description all point the same way.

Practitioners have tested the name field directly, and the published results point one way. In a 2021 write-up, Whitespark's Darren Shaw describes a test that Joy Hawkins of Sterling Sky published in June 2020. Her team added "salad bar" to the profile name of a restaurant that had no salad bar and no mention of one on its website: it went from not ranking for the term to fourth, dropped when the words came out and rose again when they went back in. Whitespark's own test, adding "SEO company Edmonton" to its listing name, took it from not ranking to sixth in the Local Finder for that term within three days, and its rankings fell away once Google removed the words. Both of those added keywords that were not the business's real name, which breaks the guidelines; they show what the field can carry, and neither is a tactic to copy. The same write-up reports a US client with about 24 locations that changed its name properly, on its state registration, licence, signage, website and citations, and went from about 274 to 520 tracked keywords ranking in positions 1 to 3.¹⁰ These are single cases measured with Whitespark's own rank tracker, not controlled studies. In Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors, a survey in which 47 local search practitioners scored 187 factors, keywords in the Business Profile name came third for map pack and Maps rankings, behind the primary category and the searcher's distance from the business. It is expert opinion, and the report itself says none of the experts has special access to Google's local algorithm.¹¹

Google has not confirmed any of that, and has not said how much weight the name carries against categories, reviews, distance and everything else. What Google has done is write specific rules for the name field: no service information, no location information and no taglines unless they are part of the real-world name, with suspension as a possible result.⁶ In my reading, a platform does not police a field that closely unless what goes in it matters. That is an inference, and you should treat it as one.

Consistency: the records reinforce each other

Businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up in local results, and prominence rests partly on how many websites link to a business and how many reviews it has.⁹ A keyword name helps both only when it is consistent. Three effects follow from the name being the same everywhere:

• Branded and service searches converge. Someone who heard of Leeds Drain Services from a neighbour searches the name. Someone with a blocked drain searches "drain services Leeds". The same words lead to the same profile and the same site.
• Links carry the keyword without anyone stuffing it in. Links are a signal of how relevant a page is, and anchor text tells people and Google something about the page being linked to.¹² A local club, supplier or newspaper linking to Leeds Drain Services uses the name as the link text because that is the name. Nobody has to ask for keyword anchor text. Links with optimised anchor text in articles, guest posts or press releases are among the examples of link spam in Google's spam policies.¹³
• Reviews mention the business by name in the customer's own words. Google has not said whether the words in reviews affect ranking, so I would not count on it. What you must not do is ask customers to include particular words: merchants asking for reviews that include specific content is one of the practices the Maps content policy prohibits.¹⁴

Structured data closes the loop on the website. Marking the home page up with the business's name, legalName, url and sameAs links to its Business Profile and directory listings gives Google one more record that says these are all the same organisation.⁸ AI assistants that name local businesses draw on the same kinds of public records, and I cover what is known about that in how an assistant decides which businesses to name.

The broken version

Now take Halden Plumbing, if it bought leedsplumber.co.uk, moved the website to it, and changed the profile name to "Halden Plumbing | Emergency Plumber Leeds" while the vans, invoices and Companies House record stayed as they are.

The keyword now appears only in the places that were easy to change, and one of them breaks Google's rules. The records that carry weight, the real name, the reviews and the links, still say Halden Plumbing. Nothing has been gained, and the profile is at risk.

What a keyword name cannot do

• It cannot beat distance. Distance is how far each business is from the customer who is searching.⁹ Calling the business Leeds Drain Services does not move it closer to someone searching in Bradford.
• It cannot rank on the address alone. Without the real-world name behind it, a keyword domain has hardly any effect.³
• It cannot buy reputation. Google says there is "no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google", and prominence comes partly from links and reviews.⁹ A new keyword-named firm with no reviews still starts at the bottom.
• It is hard to protect. A name that describes a service and a place is hard to register as a trade mark and easy for competitors to echo, which is covered in stage 3.
• It does not stretch. Leeds Drain Services says nothing about Wakefield or bathroom fitting. A firm that expects to grow beyond one trade and one town may outgrow it.

Apply this to the two examples. For the new drainage firm, every record is still blank, so the name can be the same everywhere from day one at no extra cost. For Halden Plumbing, the keyword would sit only on the address unless the firm renamed itself completely, and the next stage shows what a rename costs on Google.

A keyword domain tempts people into one of two moves: adding the keyword to the Business Profile name, or renaming the business so the name matches the domain. The first breaks Google's guidelines. The second is legitimate when it is a real name carried through everywhere and checked properly first. For a new business, it is simply the normal job of choosing a name.

What the Business Profile guidelines allow

Google's guidelines list things that must not be added to the name, including marketing taglines, phone numbers and website addresses, service or product information, and location information, and they say that including unnecessary information in the name "isn't permitted, and could result in the suspension of your Business Profile."⁶ So "Halden Plumbing" is the profile name, and "Halden Plumbing | Emergency Plumber Leeds" is not allowed, whatever domain the firm owns.

The guidelines do not forbid a name that happens to contain a trade or a place. A business that genuinely trades as Leeds Drain Services, with that name on its signs, vans, invoices and website and in the way customers refer to it, can use that name on its profile, because it is the real-world name.⁶ The test is the real world. A name used only on the website and the profile, while the van says something else, fails it.

What a rename costs an established business

A rebrand keeps the same profile only when it is a minor name change, where the proper nouns and services in the name stay the same and so does the business category. A business that changes its name in any other way is considered a new business: the existing profile should be marked as closed and a new profile created.⁶ A name change after verification can also mean verifying again.⁷

Going from Halden Plumbing to Leeds Plumber changes the proper noun. As I read the guidelines, that rename would mean a new profile, and the reviews the firm has built up sit on the one marked closed. For an established firm that is a heavy price for a name that is hard to protect. For the new drainage firm there is no profile and nothing to lose, which is why the keyword name is a fair choice there and a poor one for Halden.

UK business name rules

This part is for the UK. Other countries have their own registration and naming rules, so check with the relevant government body if you trade elsewhere.

• A limited company can trade under a name different from its registered name; GOV.UK calls this a business name. A business name must not include "limited", "Ltd", "LLP" or "plc", and must not contain a sensitive word or expression unless you get permission.¹⁵
• A sole trader can trade under their own name or a business name. If they use a business name, they must include their own name and the business name on official paperwork such as invoices and letters.⁴
• Sensitive words are listed by Companies House and cover company and business names. They include words such as Accredited, Association, Chartered, Institute, Royal, British and England, and using them needs prior approval or a letter of non-objection from the relevant body.¹⁶ "Yorkshire Drainage Association" or "British Drain Services" would run into this rule.
• If a name is too similar to another company's trade mark, GOV.UK says you may have to change it if someone complains.¹⁵⁴ The Intellectual Property Office's trade mark search lets you check whether a similar mark already exists in the UK and who owns it.¹⁷

Names that describe a trade and a town are usually hard to register as trade marks yourself, because they describe the service and the place, and other firms in the same town may already use something close. That cuts both ways: it is unlikely anyone owns "Leeds Drain Services" outright, and you are unlikely to be able to stop a competitor trading as "Leeds Drainage Services Ltd". I would treat that as a reason for caution, and take advice from a trade mark attorney before relying on a descriptive name as the brand.

A name that carries a keyword and still works as a brand

The best keyword names read as the name of a business. A name that reads like a search query puts customers off. "Leeds Drain Services" reads like a firm. "Drain Unblocking Leeds Cheap" reads like spam, and customers will treat it that way. Some patterns that tend to work for trades: town plus trade plus a business word (Services, Plumbing, Electrical, Roofing); a local landmark or area plus trade (Aire Valley Drains, Kirkstall Roofing); or a short distinctive word plus trade (Halden Plumbing already does this, which is part of why it does not need a keyword). The area-plus-trade pattern carries a place word while being harder to confuse with competitors. Say each candidate aloud as you would answer the phone. If it sounds odd, it will look odd on a van.

Checking a name against your local competitors

A keyword name sits close to other keyword names by nature. If three firms in Leeds already trade as Leeds Drainage, Leeds Drain Care and Drains Leeds, a fourth called Leeds Drain Services will be confused with them by customers, by reviewers who leave a review on the wrong profile, and possibly by Google. Search Google Maps for your trade in your town and the next two towns over, and write down every name that shares two or more words with yours.

A domain that has never been registered has no past. Short, obvious trade and town names have usually been registered by someone before, so if you are being offered one, it is likely to be either an expired domain that has just been released or one an owner is selling. Either way, its history comes with it. If your chosen name's domain is unregistered, as leedsdrainservices.co.uk is in the example, you can skip to the scorecard.

What it was used for: the Wayback Machine

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine at web.archive.org keeps copies of web pages captured over time. Enter the domain and look at the calendar of captures. You are looking for three things: whether it was a real business site, what subject it covered, and whether it ever turned into something else, such as pages of unrelated articles, casino or loan content, pages in another language, or a parked page full of adverts. The archive does not capture every site or every page, so a gap tells you nothing for certain.

Who links to it

Before you own the domain you cannot verify it in Search Console, so you need a third-party backlink tool for this step, such as Ahrefs, Semrush or Majestic. Most have a free check or trial. Look at the referring sites and the link text. Links from local directories, suppliers or a local paper are what a real trade business's site would have. Links from unrelated foreign sites, pages of keyword-stuffed link text, or blog networks with no clear owner suggest someone used the domain to manipulate rankings in the past.

Spam and Google's expired domain policy

Google's spam policies define expired domain abuse as "where an expired domain name is purchased and repurposed primarily to manipulate search rankings by hosting content that provides little to no value to users."¹³ Its examples include affiliate content on a site previously used by a government agency, and casino content on a former school site. The policy is about the purpose and the content. A plumber who buys a lapsed plumbing domain and runs a real plumbing business on it is not what the examples describe. Someone who buys a domain because of its old links and fills it with thin pages to rank is.

Policy breaches are detected through automated systems and, as needed, human review that can lead to a manual action, and sites breaching the policies may rank lower or not appear at all.¹³ A previous owner's manual action can still be in place when you take over. Once you own the domain and verify it in Search Console, the Manual actions report shows any action against it; after fixing the issue, you select Request Review and describe what you did. Most reconsideration reviews take several days or weeks, and link-related ones can take longer.¹⁸ You cannot see that report until you own the domain, which is why the checks above happen first.

Checking the price against the value

A broker's price reflects what other buyers might pay, which for keyword domains includes people building lead generation sites. It says nothing about what the domain is worth to you. For Halden Plumbing, with an established brand, the domain's worth is roughly what it would cost to stop a competitor using it plus whatever type-in traffic it brings, and both are small and uncertain. Say the firm decides that £150 is the most those are worth to it. A four-figure asking price is then an easy no. For a new firm choosing its name, an unregistered domain costs a normal registration fee, which is one more reason to pick a name whose domain is free.

Use the scorecard below on any domain you are seriously considering. Score it honestly, and if two domains are on the table, score each one separately.

With the mechanism, the naming rules and the history in hand, the decision is usually clearer than it felt at the start. Answer the questions below honestly; the outcome comes with what to do next.

Way one: the keyword domain as the main brand

This is the way of running a keyword domain that holds together, and it requires the keyword to be the business's real name. The registration, the domain, the signs, the invoices, the Business Profile and the way customers refer to the business all say the same thing. For the new drainage firm, Leeds Drain Services on leedsdrainservices.co.uk is a coherent brand, and stages 6 and 7 set it up. It will not rank because of the address, and it competes with every firm whose name sounds similar, so it still needs reviews, profile work and useful pages.

The version that does not hold together is common: a keyword domain as the main website while the van, the profile and the invoices carry another name. Customers who search the brand name land on a site with a different name. The profile and the site disagree. And if the profile name is changed to match the website without the real-world name changing, that breaks Google's name guidelines.⁶

Way two: a separate second site

This is where most of the risk sits. A second site at leedsplumber.co.uk with the same services as haldenplumbing.co.uk, rewritten slightly, with the same phone number and a link through to the main site, is very close to two of the examples Google gives of doorway abuse: "Having multiple websites with slight variations to the URL and home page to maximize their reach for any specific query" and "Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page."¹³ Doorways are sites or pages "created to rank for specific, similar search queries" that lead users to intermediate pages that are less useful than the final destination.¹³

Two self-assessment questions for helpful content apply here: whether you are producing lots of content on many different topics in the hope that some of it performs in search, and whether you entered a topic mainly because you thought you would get search traffic.¹⁹ A second site built to catch "plumber Leeds" while the business already has a site that serves Leeds answers yes to the second question.

A second site can be legitimate when it is a separate offer with its own reason to exist. If Halden Plumbing also ran a bathroom design showroom with its own staff, premises and customers, a separate site for the showroom could make sense. If it is the same plumbers doing the same jobs, it should be one site. The same thinking applies to town pages within one site, which I cover in location pages that are not doorway pages.

• Duplicate content between the two sites is the most common problem. Two sites saying the same thing compete with each other and give Google two versions to choose between. Write every page on the second site for its own purpose, or do not have the page.
• A Business Profile can only show one website. It should represent your individual business location, and the URL must not redirect or refer users to landing pages other than those of the actual business.⁶ The profile should point at the site that is genuinely the business's own.
• Two sites means two sets of updates, prices, opening hours and phone numbers to keep in step. When one goes stale, it shows customers outdated information under your name.

Way three: redirect it into the main site

A permanent redirect (a 301) from the keyword domain to the main site is the lowest-risk way for an established business to own one. Google's indexing pipeline uses a permanent redirect as a signal that the redirect target should be canonical, so it is the main site that appears in results.²⁰ Visitors who type the keyword domain or follow an old link to it end up on your real site.

Whether it is worth anything depends on what the domain brings. A redirect is close to pointless when the domain has never been registered, has no links, and will not appear anywhere offline: there is nothing to send, and the keyword in the address carries hardly any ranking value by Google's own account.³ It can be worth doing when the domain has relevant past links that would otherwise lead nowhere, when you will print it on vans or adverts because it is easier to remember than your brand, or when it is cheap enough that keeping it from a competitor is worth the renewal fee. A new keyword-named business should also register the obvious misspellings and plural of its own domain and redirect them in the same way.

For the new drainage firm, the tool lands on "Use it as your main brand, with a real trading name" once the name checks are clear. For Halden Plumbing, it lands on "Keep your brand domain" if the owner wanted to replace the site, and on "Redirect it into your main site" or "Don't buy it" otherwise. At a four-figure price with no relevant links and no plan to paint it on the vans, Halden's answer is no.

The order matters. Register the business name first, then buy the domains, so that you never own a domain for a name you then cannot use. Do both within a day or two of each other, so nobody registers the domain in between.

Register the name

This is the UK route. For a limited company, GOV.UK says registering online costs £100 and the company is usually registered within 24 hours; a postal application costs £124 and takes 8 to 10 days. You may need the Companies House personal code you receive after verifying your identity, and each director needs their own.²¹ Those are the figures at the time of writing; check the page before you apply.

For a sole trader, there is no name register. GOV.UK says you must register for Self Assessment as a sole trader if you earn more than £1,000 from self-employment in a tax year.²² A sole trader trading as Leeds Drain Services must show both their own name and the business name on invoices and letters.⁴ Whether to form a company or trade as a sole trader is a tax and liability question for an accountant; either route can carry a keyword trading name.

Once registered, a limited company's website and business letters must show its registered number, its registered office address, where it is registered and that it is a limited company, and it must display its name at its registered address and wherever it operates, with an exemption for home-based businesses.⁵ Write those details down now, because you will put them on the website footer, the invoices and the email signature.

Buy the domains

Buy the main domain and the variants together: leedsdrainservices.co.uk, leedsdrainservices.uk, and the obvious misspellings or plural if they are cheap. Any registrar that sells .uk endings will do; these are examples, and none is an endorsement:

• 123 Reg, a UK registrar that sells .uk and .co.uk domains.²³ It suits owners who want a UK company and a simple control panel.
• IONOS, which sells .co.uk domains alongside hosting and website builder plans.²⁴ It suits owners who want the domain and the site in one account.
• Cloudflare Registrar, which says it does not mark up domain prices and charges only what the registries and ICANN charge.²⁵ Its list of supported endings includes .uk and .co.uk,²⁶ and every domain registered with it has to use Cloudflare's nameservers,²⁷ so it suits owners comfortable with a more technical dashboard.

Introductory offers are common, so compare the renewal price as well as the first-year price. Whichever you choose, register the domain in the business's own account with the business as registrant, turn on auto-renew, use an email address the business controls long term, turn on two-step sign-in, and turn on the transfer lock if the registrar offers one. The usual way a business loses a domain is through admin: a card expires, renewal emails go to a former web designer, and the domain lapses.

Email on the domain

Use email at the domain from day one: enquiries@leedsdrainservices.co.uk on the van and the invoices reinforces the name every time a customer reads it. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 are the two common choices. Microsoft's documentation describes adding a custom domain in the admin centre: either automatically through Domain Connect, where your registrar supports it, or by adding a TXT record to verify ownership and then the DNS records Microsoft lists, after which the domain's MX record points email to Microsoft 365. It also says to add users and mailboxes before adding the MX record, so email keeps working during the move.²⁸ Google Workspace has its own domain set-up steps.

Hosting and the build

A local trade site needs a handful of pages done well, so the build choice matters less than the content. Common routes, as examples:

• A hosted website builder such as Squarespace or Wix. Suits an owner who wants to edit the site themselves and does not want to manage hosting.
• WordPress on a UK web host. Suits an owner who expects to add pages often or wants a developer to extend it later; it needs updates and backups.
• A static site built with an AI coding agent such as Claude Code or Cursor, hosted on a service such as Cloudflare Pages or Netlify. Suits someone comfortable working with code and reviewing what the agent produces. The free SEO for AI Agents skill pack on this site teaches those agents to build and audit sites for search; its structured data skill adds JSON-LD that matches the visible page, and its launch checks look for problems that commonly stop a new site being indexed, such as a leftover noindex or a robots block.

DNS and HTTPS

DNS is the set of records that tells the internet where the domain's website and email live. Point the main domain at your web host as the host instructs. For the variant domains, the simplest set-up is usually a redirect rule at the registrar or host; check that it is a permanent 301 and that it redirects every URL, not only the home page. Serve every domain over HTTPS with a certificate that renews automatically, and make redirects work on both http and https, and with and without www. A redirect that works only on one of the four versions leaves the others broken.

Search Console

Add each domain to Google Search Console as a Domain property. A Domain property includes all subdomains, such as www, and both http and https, and it is verified by adding a DNS record.²⁹ Do this for redirect domains too: it is the only way to see whether Google has any manual actions against them, and it gives you the Links report for their past links. Open the Manual actions report the day you verify.¹⁸

This stage turns a registered name into a business that search engines can recognise as one entity. For the new drainage firm, everything starts blank, so each record can be right first time. If you are an established business keeping its brand, the same steps apply to your existing name, and you can use them to fix records that have drifted.

Signs, van and stationery first

Put the name on the van, the yard sign, the quote template, the invoice template and the email signature before you create the Business Profile. The profile name has to reflect the name used on your storefront and stationery,⁶ so the real-world use should exist first. It also means you can show the name if verification asks for evidence.

Create and verify the Business Profile

Go to business.google.com/add, select "Add your business to Google", follow the on-screen steps to enter the business details, then select a verification option.³⁰ Enter the name exactly as it appears on the signs and stationery.⁷ For a business that travels to customers and does not serve them at its address, set a service area and hide the address, which is covered in service area businesses explained.

The verification methods are phone or text, email, live video call and mail; Google decides which are available to you, and you cannot change them. Verification reviews take up to 5 business days, Google might request more details if some business details were recently updated, and if you are verifying by postcard you should not edit the business name, address or category, because the code will stop working.³¹ If you are offered a video call, follow the on-screen instructions for what to show; having the name on a sign, a van and an invoice ready to film is the practical reason to do the real-world branding first.

Choose the most specific primary category that describes the core of the business, and use the description to say what you do and where, in plain language. Do not repeat the name in the description as a keyword device; it already carries the words.

The website: the name in the right places

• The logo or name in the header, as text or with accessible alternative text, reading exactly "Leeds Drain Services".
• The home page title tag starting with the name and the main service, for example "Leeds Drain Services | Blocked drains and drain repairs".
• The footer showing the trading name, the full legal name, the registered number, registered office address and where registered for a limited company,⁵ plus the phone number and service area in the same format as the Business Profile.
• One page per main service, saying what the job involves, what affects the price, how quickly you can attend and how to book, with photos of real jobs.
• An About page that says who runs the business, how long they have worked in the trade and where they are based, under the business name.

Keep it to the pages you can make genuinely useful. More pages are not the answer for most local firms, which I explain in most local businesses do not need more content.

Structured data on the home page

For a local business, use the most specific subtype of LocalBusiness. For Google's local business markup, name and address are required, with url and telephone among the recommended properties.⁸³² Schema.org defines Plumber as a type under LocalBusiness and HomeAndConstructionBusiness, describes legalName as "the official name of the organization, e.g. the registered company name", and sameAs as the URL of a page that unambiguously indicates the item's identity.³³ Plumber is the closest type for a drainage firm; if none fits, HomeAndConstructionBusiness is its parent.

A trimmed example, with invented details: {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Plumber","name":"Leeds Drain Services","legalName":"Leeds Drain Services Ltd","url":"https://leedsdrainservices.co.uk/","telephone":"+44 113 000 0000","address":{"@type":"PostalAddress","streetAddress":"Unit 0, Example Yard","addressLocality":"Leeds","postalCode":"LS0 0XX","addressCountry":"GB"},"sameAs":["https://www.example-directory.co.uk/leeds-drain-services"]}. Mark up only what the page shows, and test it with Google's Rich Results Test before you publish.

Bing Places, Apple Business and directories

Bing's announcement of its rebuilt Bing Places for Business, now at bing.com/forbusiness, says the import from Google is faster and better at preserving the business name, hours and contact details, and that listings appear in Bing search results and Bing Maps.³⁴ Importing from the verified Business Profile is the quickest way to get the same name onto Bing. Apple Business lets a business claim its location on Apple Maps and control how it appears, with its logo, hours, images and key details.³⁵

Then the directories customers in your trade actually use. For a UK trade, examples include Yell, Thomson Local, Checkatrade, TrustATrader, MyBuilder and FreeIndex, plus any trade association you genuinely belong to. Some are free listings and some are paid membership schemes with vetting; read the terms before you pay. Ten accurate listings that customers use beat fifty that nobody reads. Enter the name, address, phone and website exactly as they are on the Business Profile, and keep a list of every listing with its login, because you will need to update them all if anything changes.

Reviews, collected the compliant way

You can ask customers to leave a review through a Google link or a QR code, and offering incentives such as free or discounted goods or services in exchange for reviews is not allowed.³⁶ The Maps content policy also prohibits paid reviews, discouraging negative reviews or selectively soliciting positive ones, and merchants asking for reviews that include specific content.¹⁴ So ask every customer, not only the happy ones, and do not suggest what they write, including the keywords in your name.

UK law sits on top of Google's rules. The Competition and Markets Authority's guide for businesses lists fake reviews, reviews that conceal that they were incentivised, and false or misleading consumer review information as banned practices.³⁷ Disclosed incentives can be lawful in the UK, but Google's own policy bans incentives for Google reviews outright, so for your Business Profile the answer is simple: no incentives of any kind.

A practical routine for a trade: put the review QR code on the back of the invoice, send the review link by text the evening after the job, and reply to every review under the business name. Customers will tend to write the name they know, which is the name on the van.

Links that use the name

Local links come from real connections: a supplier's list of approved installers, a residents' association newsletter, a trade association member directory, or a local news story about the business. Each one will usually use the business name as the link text, which for a keyword-named business carries the keyword without anyone asking for it.¹² Link spam means creating links primarily to manipulate rankings. The examples in Google's spam policies include buying links and exchanging goods or services for links, and paid and sponsored links are acceptable when marked with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow".¹³ So if you sponsor a local club, expect the link to carry that attribute, and value it for the people who see your name. You do not need keyword link text when the name does the work.

Set the baseline before anything changes

You cannot judge a change without a before. For an established business, before the domain goes live, write down your monthly enquiries by source (calls, forms, the Business Profile, referrals), your Business Profile calls and website clicks, and your site's clicks and impressions in Search Console for your main service searches. Use the same months a year earlier too, because many trades are seasonal and a boiler engineer's winter will flatter any change made in autumn. A new business has no before, so record the first full month as the baseline and judge the trend from there.

What to measure for each way of running it

For a keyword-named business, watch how the name and the service searches move together in Search Console. If the queries for "leeds drain services" and for "drain services leeds" both lead to the same pages and both grow, the name is doing the converging job described in stage 2. If only the exact name grows, customers know you but the service searches are going elsewhere, and the profile, reviews and service pages are where to work.

The honest test for a second site is whether the business gets more enquiries in total. If enquiries move from the main site to the second site and the total stays flat, the second site has added cost and nothing else. Say Halden Plumbing had run one and the main site's form enquiries fell by about as many as the second site gained: that would be a result to act on.

Give it long enough. Six months is a fair first look for a redirect or second site; for a new business or a rebrand, give it a year so you can compare the same season. If a redirect or second site is not clearly paying for its renewal and upkeep by then, back out.

How to back out cleanly

Backing out of a second site or a keyword main site means moving its content and signals to the domain you are keeping. The tool is the same as in way three: permanent redirects. Use permanent server-side redirects such as 301 or 308, and keep them for as long as possible, generally at least a year.³⁸ With any significant change you may see ranking fluctuations while Google recrawls and reindexes the site.³⁸

• Map every URL on the domain you are closing to the most relevant URL on the domain you are keeping. Merge any content that is genuinely useful into the main site first, so there is a relevant page to redirect to. The method is in how to build a redirect map.
• Set 301 redirects for every URL, on every version of the domain, and test them.
• Keep the domain registered and renewing for as long as anything points at it. Letting it lapse throws away the redirects and lets someone else buy it.
• If a Business Profile pointed at the closing site, change its website field to the main site on the day the redirects go live, and update the url and sameAs in your structured data and every directory listing.

When the Change of Address tool applies

Search Console's Change of Address tool tells Google about a move from one domain or subdomain to another and helps migrate search results from the old site to the new one. It is for moving a website from one domain to another. You must own both properties in Search Console under the same Google account, it works only at domain level, not on paths, and you need a 301 redirect from the old home page to the new home page. Keep the redirects for at least 180 days; and the tool shows a notification in Search Console for 180 days.³⁹

It applies when a whole site moves: closing a keyword main site and moving the business back to its brand domain, or closing a second site with real content and folding it into the main site. It does nothing useful for a domain that has only ever redirected, because there was never a site there to move. Moves cannot be chained: if you submit a change from site A to site B, you cannot immediately submit another from B to C, and combining several migrations into one destination at the same time can cause confusion and traffic loss.³⁹ If you are closing two keyword domains, move them one at a time. What to watch in the weeks after is covered in the first month after a site migration, and the wider subject in the website migrations guide.