I didn’t plan to end up talking about Google algorithms at this stage of my life.
If you’d asked me ten years ago what I thought about SEO, I’d have said it was something other people worried about.
Tech people.
Marketing people.
Agencies.
I just wanted my business to show up when someone nearby searched for what I did.
That was it.
If they could find me, the phone rang.
If they couldn’t, it didn’t.
Like most local business owners, I was told the same thing over and over again.
SEO takes time.
Google needs to trust you.
You have to be patient.
So I hired an agency.
They sounded confident.
They spoke the language.
They talked about authority, content, technical fixes, long term strategy.
They warned me not to expect quick results.
Three to six months was normal, they said.
Sometimes longer.
I didn’t argue.
I didn’t know enough to argue.
They were the experts.
So I paid them every month and waited.
The reports came in.
Lots of charts.
Lots of arrows pointing upwards.
Everything was always moving in the right direction, apparently.
Trust the process.
But the phone didn’t ring any more than it had before.
That was the first crack.
After a while, I started asking questions.
Simple ones.
What exactly are you building for me?
Where do these links live?
What do I still have if I stop paying?
That’s when it became uncomfortable?
Nothing was really mine.
The links were rented.
The content lived on sites I didn’t control.
If I cancelled, it all disappeared.
I wasn’t paying to build anything.
I was paying to borrow momentum.
That didn’t sit right.
So I stopped the agency and decided to look at the problem properly.
Not from an SEO point of view, but from a common sense one.
What does Google actually want to see when it ranks local businesses.
Not what agencies say it wants.
What it clearly rewards.
So I did the most basic thing possible.
I searched.
I typed services and locations into Google and looked at who actually showed up.
Not theory.
Not best practice.
Reality.
And a pattern started to emerge.
The businesses ranking well locally weren’t always the biggest or the flashiest.
Some of their websites were fairly average.
But they all had one thing in common.
They were clearly relevant.
They were clearly local.
And there were signals around them that reinforced that fact.
This is the part most people miss.
Google doesn’t just rank websites.
It ranks entities.
Real businesses, tied to real locations, providing real services.
By 2026, that’s more true than ever.
Google wants to see that a business exists, operates locally, is talked about locally, and is connected to its area in a way that makes sense.
It wants consistency, clarity, and relevance far more than clever tricks.
And one of the strongest ways it understands that is through locally relevant backlinks.
Not random links from generic blogs.
Not high authority sites that have nothing to do with your area.
Links from websites that clearly relate to the same location and service.
That’s when things clicked.
I realised that most SEO was slow because it wasn’t speaking Google’s language clearly enough.
It was hoping that lots of weak signals would eventually add up.
I decided to test something different.
I bought a domain and built a simple one page website.
It was properly optimised for a local search term.
Clear content.
Clear location.
Clear service.
Nothing spammy.
Nothing clever.
I waited for Google to index it.
That usually took a few days.
Once it was indexed, I placed a branded link from that site to a main website.
Not a keyword stuffed anchor.
Just the business name.
The kind of link that makes sense in the real world.
Then I did nothing else.
I expected to wait months.
That’s what I’d been trained to expect.
I didn’t.
Rankings moved far quicker than they were supposed to.
That was when I stopped believing the idea that SEO had to be slow.
What Google responded to wasn’t volume. It was relevance.
From there, everything changed.
I stopped thinking about SEO as something you rent and started thinking about it as something you build.
Websites.
Domains.
Assets that exist independently and reinforce a business’s place in its local market.
That idea eventually became Locally Relevant.
But the real proof came from a test we ran for a local electrician.
This electrician already had a website.
It was indexed.
It was reasonably well optimised.
There was nothing obviously wrong with it.
We didn’t touch it.
No on page changes.
No technical fixes.
No new content.
Nothing.
All we did was build one locally relevant, one page website targeting a specific local search term.
We got it indexed.
Then we placed a branded, locally relevant backlink to the electrician’s main website.
We tracked the results carefully.
The initial test window was just 24 hours apart.
Within that window, rankings moved.
Not random fluctuation.
Real movement.
High intent local keywords moved up.
One term jumped from position six to position three.
Others shifted higher on page one.
Overall visibility improved.
That alone told us the link had been recognised and weighted.
But something else happened that mattered even more.
That one page website didn’t just exist to link out.
It started ranking on its own.
And it started generating leads.
Real enquiries.
Phone calls.
Form submissions.
On top of the electrician’s usual enquiries, that single supporting site began pulling in an extra ten to twenty leads a month.
No ads.
No ongoing content.
Just a clean, locally relevant website doing what Google wants websites to do.
That was the moment everything came together.
This wasn’t just a ranking tactic.
It was a way to own more of the local search landscape.
Instead of relying on one website and one position, the business now had multiple entry points.
Multiple chances to be found.
Multiple signals reinforcing the same message to Google.
This is exactly what Google wants to see in 2026.
It wants to see that a business is genuinely embedded in its local area.
That it shows up consistently.
That there are multiple, natural signals confirming its relevance.
Locally relevant backlinks are one of the strongest ways to provide that confirmation.
That’s why we changed how we offer the service.
For every locally relevant link placement we do, we build the supporting website as part of the service.
Completely free.
Not an upsell.
Not rented.
We register the domain.
We build the site.
We host it for the first month.
We get it indexed properly.
Once that’s done, we place the branded link.
The client owns it.
Always.
If they stop working with us, they keep the site.
No tricks.
No lock ins.
Once people understand that, everything changes.
Instead of asking whether SEO might work eventually, they ask how many locally relevant signals they should build.
One supporting site can move rankings.
Three bring consistency.
Six start to push competitors down.
Twelve can dominate a local search space.
Not because of manipulation.
Because of clarity.
Google isn’t being fooled.
It’s being helped.
We’re honest about timelines too.
These sites need to be indexed first, which usually takes a few days.
Once the link is placed, results typically start to show within seven to fourteen days.
Sometimes sooner.
Sometimes a bit slower.
But measured in weeks, not three to six months.
At this point in my life, I don’t care about hype.
I care about things that work and leave people better off than when they started.
That’s why we start with a trial.
One locally relevant link placement.
One free, SEO optimised website built for your business.
Domain registered.
Hosted for a month.
Indexed properly.
Then linked.
You see how Google responds.
You see whether it makes sense for your business.
You decide what to do next.
If you want to scale, we have packages.
Three, six, twelve.
Every link placement comes with another site built for you.
Every site owned by you.
If you don’t want to continue, that’s fine too.
You still have the site.
You might even still be getting leads from it.
This isn’t black hat.
It isn’t a shortcut.
It isn’t about gaming anything.
It’s about giving Google what it wants to see in local search in 2026.
Clear relevance.
Clear location.
Clear signals.
I didn’t set out to build a new way of doing SEO.
I just got tired of being told to wait.
If you’re a local business owner who wants faster movement, more page one presence, and assets you actually own, this was built for you.
You don’t need to believe a word of it.
Start with one.
Let Google show you the rest.