Local SEO for service businesses: cleaning, moving, IT and consulting

Searches for local services follow three patterns, and people type them in Romanian, usually without diacritics:

• service, city and price: “curatenie apartament 2 camere pret” (cleaning a two-room flat, price), “transport mobila cluj pret” (furniture moving in Cluj, price);
• service and neighbourhood: “reparatii laptop cluj manastur” (laptop repair in Mănăștur);
• a specific, often urgent problem: “firma deratizare cluj” (pest control company), “firma deratizare plosnite pret” (bed bug treatment price).

Google usually answers with a map of three businesses (the local pack), then the regular results. On the map, the order depends on three things: how relevant your profile is to the search, how close you are to the person searching, and how well known you are (reviews, mentions, your site). In the regular results, the page that answers directly wins: what the service includes, roughly what it costs, how long it takes, where you go.

For business-to-business services like IT or consulting, the map matters less. Clients are looking for a fix to a problem and compare providers, so expertise pages, case studies and who signs the content carry more weight.

In the SEO Foundation:

• we set up your Google Business Profile for a business that travels to customers: address hidden, up to 20 service areas, correct categories and services;
• we map the searches: which services people look for, in what words, in which areas, and which page answers each one;
• we fix the technical side (indexing, sitemap, Search Console) and add LocalBusiness structured data with your service area and hours;
• we check that your quote form works and actually reaches you.

A good service page has: what's included and what isn't, a price range and what drives it (floor area, floor number, distance, urgency), how the job goes, the area you cover, how fast you reply, and a form where the customer can send photos or measurements. With Growth we improve pages like these month by month, starting with the services that bring you the most enquiries.

The Local package keeps your profile alive with photos and posts from real jobs. For a business with no premises open to the public, the profile and its reviews are often the first thing a customer sees.

• Fake addresses. A cleaning or moving company that lists a “branch” at a virtual office or a borrowed address in every city risks having its profile suspended: such addresses aren't eligible on Google Business Profile.
• Keywords in the business name. Adding “cleaning Cluj non-stop” to your name on the map, when your registered name is different, breaks Google's rules.
• The same pest-control or moving page copied for dozens of towns, with a different town in the title. Google treats such pages as doorway pages and can drop them from results; an area page is only justified by jobs done there and what's specific to the area.
• “24/7” on the site when nobody answers at night. With pest control, customers call straight away; hours that aren't true bring negative reviews and can be misleading advertising. We publish your real hours and, if you take emergencies, the window in which you actually answer.

On the legal side, we only write what you can prove. If your activity needs an authorisation (security services under Law 333/2003, paid road transport with an ARR licence, pest control with a sanitary authorisation), we check the document before writing “authorised” on your site. We don't write “cheapest in Cluj” without proof, because that's misleading advertising (Law 158/2008). With reviews, we don't offer discounts in exchange, don't ask only happy customers, and never write fake ones: both Google and the law forbid it.

The Google Business Profile setup and the technical fixes take 2–4 weeks. If Google asks to verify or re-verify the profile, that timing is up to Google, not us.

Rankings usually move in 3–6 months. On the map, distance remains a factor: a business based in one neighbourhood shows up more easily for nearby searches than for ones on the other side of town, even if it lists every area. Service areas tell Google where you work; they don't move you closer.

Each monthly report lists the views, calls and visits that came from Google, so you can set them against the quote requests you received. Neither reviews nor orders come with a promised number; what we promise is the work written in the offer.