“Hevva!”
The Huer’s Hut on Towan Head is one of those Newquay landmarks that is easy to walk past without thinking too hard about what it was actually for.
Small. White. Slightly odd-looking.
Historic England dates the surviving building as probably late eighteenth to early nineteenth century. Its purpose was much simpler than the mythology that has gathered around it: the huer watched the sea for pilchard shoals and signalled to the boats below. Cornwall Council and the National Maritime Museum Cornwall both record the cry “Hevva!”, and the museum also records the use of a horn.
Somebody had the better view.
They spotted the opportunity.
Then they sent a signal the people below could understand.
Local SEO is not entirely unlike that.
Most businesses are not invisible. They are ambiguous.
When somebody tells me their website “doesn’t show up on Google”, the instinct is often to assume there is some mysterious technical switch that has not been turned on.
Sometimes there is a technical problem.
Quite often, the business is simply not giving search engines — or customers — a very clear picture of what it is, where it operates and why it is relevant.
You still see homepages saying things such as:
We provide innovative solutions tailored to your needs.
Excellent.
What solutions?
Whose needs?
Where?
For all Google knows, you could be a consultancy in Milton Keynes or a man in a shed repairing surfboards in St Columb.
Specificity is useful.
Structured data helps. It is not magic dust.
Structured data can give Google explicit, machine-readable information about a page.
For a local business, that can include things such as business type, location and opening hours.
Useful.
Not magical.
Adding LocalBusiness schema to a vague website will not cause Google to stand up, salute and award you Newquay.
Nor does the markup itself guarantee a rich result or a better local ranking.
The underlying information still needs to make sense.
Your website, Business Profile, contact details, opening hours and service information should broadly agree with one another. If you say you work across Cornwall, the site should contain some evidence that you actually do.
Local relevance should look like real life
This is where a regional business can show something generic national copy often cannot: actual local knowledge.
You know the places.
You know the awkward bits.
You know that “near Newquay” can mean a ten-minute drive in February and a philosophical concept in August.
You know the difference between working in Truro, Wadebridge, Padstow and Perranporth because you have actually been there and dealt with people there.
That should appear naturally in the site.
Not by creating 47 nearly identical pages and swapping the town name.
That is grim.
I mean genuine local evidence: real projects, useful local guides, location-specific questions, photographs, partnerships, case studies and sensible references to the places you actually serve.
Google’s own spam guidance draws a distinction here too. Multiple near-duplicate city or region pages created mainly to funnel users somewhere else are not the same thing as a useful page written for a real local need.
The point is not to keep saying “Cornwall” until Google gives in.
The point is to be genuinely useful in Cornwall.
Your Google Business Profile is not a cupboard
A surprising number of businesses create a Google Business Profile, fill in the obvious bits and then treat it like something that should be stored safely and never disturbed.
It is a public-facing record of the business.
Keep it accurate.
Opening hours matter. Special hours matter. Categories matter. Reviews matter. Responses matter.
Photos and videos help customers understand what the business actually is, although I would not pretend that adding three new photos on Tuesday guarantees you a ranking improvement by Wednesday.
Google says local results are mainly influenced by relevance, distance and prominence.
That is not quite as exciting as discovering a secret ranking lever.
It is more useful.
There is a tendency in digital marketing to search for the clever thing before doing the boring thing properly.
I would generally recommend reversing that order.
Search is partly an uncertainty problem
A person searches because they need something.
The search engine is trying to work out which result is most likely to answer that need.
Your job is to make that decision easier.
Clear service descriptions.
Clear location information.
Accurate business details.
Useful pages.
Evidence that the business exists in the real world.
A public profile that has not apparently been abandoned since 2021.
It all reduces uncertainty.
And that is why I like the Huer’s Hut analogy.
The huer was not valuable because somebody stood on a cliff making noise.
Newquay has never particularly struggled for that.
The value was in seeing something useful, then sending a signal that meant something to the people who needed it.
That is a much better model for local SEO than “put more keywords on the website”.
Know who you are trying to reach.
Be specific about what you do.
Make your location and relevance clear.
Then make sure the signal can actually be read.