mtuprojects.com

Author: mtuprojects

  • The five things killing your local search ranking

    The five things killing your local search ranking

    Most local SEO problems aren’t glamorous. They’re broken basics — the kind of thing that’s easy to overlook because it doesn’t feel like ‘real’ SEO work.

    Here are the five we see most often when we audit a local business site:

    1. Inconsistent name, address and phone number across directories. Google cross-checks these. If they don’t match, it undermines trust in your listing.

    2. No Google Business Profile posts or photos. An empty, stale profile signals a business that isn’t actively managed.

    3. Missing location pages. If you serve more than one town or area, each one deserves its own page — not just a mention in a footer.

    4. Slow-loading pages on mobile. Most local searches happen on a phone. If your site drags, people bounce before they even see what you offer.

    5. No reviews strategy. Reviews are a ranking factor and a trust signal. Waiting for them to happen on their own rarely works.

    None of these need a big budget to fix — they need someone to actually go through the checklist.

  • What “AI automation” actually means for a small trades business

    What “AI automation” actually means for a small trades business

    ‘AI automation’ gets thrown around a lot, usually attached to a chatbot widget that annoys more people than it helps.

    For a small trades business, the useful version looks a lot more boring — and a lot more valuable:

    – Auto-replying to enquiries within minutes, even outside office hours, so you’re not the slowest quote in the inbox.
    – Sorting incoming leads by urgency and job type, so you spend your morning on the ones worth calling first.
    – Chasing no-shows and unconfirmed bookings automatically, instead of you remembering to do it between jobs.
    – Turning a completed job into a review request the same day, while the work is still fresh in the customer’s mind.

    None of that needs a flashy AI chatbot on your homepage. It needs a handful of systems wired together properly, running quietly in the background.

    That’s the bar we use before recommending anything: does it save real time, or is it automation for its own sake?

  • Why we stopped recommending retainers to most clients

    Why we stopped recommending retainers to most clients

    Retainers are the default pitch in this industry — a fixed monthly fee, ongoing ‘optimisation’, a report at the end of the month.

    For an ecommerce brand running constant campaigns, that can make sense. For most local SMEs, it doesn’t.

    A local business usually needs a burst of proper work up front — a website that actually converts, a Google Business Profile that’s fully built out, local SEO fundamentals in place — and then relatively little ongoing attention until something changes: a new service, a new location, a redesign.

    Paying a retainer every month for that in-between period is paying for activity, not results. So our default is now: do the project properly, hand it over once it’s paid for, and let you come back on a pay-as-you-go basis whenever something actually needs doing.

    If you genuinely need ongoing management — multi-location businesses, frequent campaigns, active AI systems that need monitoring — a retainer is the right shape. We just don’t default to it for everyone.