Local SEO on Wix: the checklist to get found in your town

"Plumber in Nantes", "florist Lyon 6", "osteopath near me": most customers of a shop, a tradesperson or a practice type the trade and the town, nothing more. If your Wix site does not say clearly what you do and where you do it, Google guesses badly and ranks you behind competitors who are worse than you.

Here is the checklist we apply to our clients' Wix sites, with what gets fixed in an afternoon and what takes two months.

Local SEO is three signals, not a secret

To rank a business on a local search, Google cross-checks three things: your Google Business Profile, what your website says, and the consistency between the two (and with the rest of the web). We already devoted an article to the Google profile and what it changes for calls and visits, so we will not repeat it here.

This checklist covers the second and third signals: the site and the consistency.

One clarification that saves a lot of disappointment: local SEO is not a box to tick in Wix. Wix provides the tools (titles, descriptions, structured data, sitemap, Search Console connection), but you have to feed them. A site whose every page is called "Home" will never be found in Bordeaux, whatever the plan you pay for.

What you fix in two hours inside Wix

Open the Wix dashboard, go to SEO, then "SEO Settings". This is where everything happens, page by page. Four quick jobs, in this order:

• The title of each page (title tag). Trade + town + name, under 60 characters. "Plumber and heating engineer in Nantes | Martin Repairs" beats "Home | Martin" every time. Do it for the homepage, the contact page and every service page.

• The meta description. One sentence of 140 to 160 characters that makes people want to call: area covered, response time, one argument. It is not a direct ranking factor, but it is what people read before they click.

• Name, address and phone number in the footer. As text, not as an image, on every page, written exactly as on your Google profile. "Street" on one side and "St." on the other, a number starting with 06 here and +33 there: Google gets confused and you lose points.

• LocalBusiness structured data. In the homepage SEO settings, "Structured data" tab, Wix offers a "Local business" markup to complete: type of activity, address, opening hours, area served. Ten minutes, and Google finally understands you are a business and not a blog.

At this point, check that your site is connected to Google Search Console (Wix offers it from the same dashboard) and that the sitemap has been submitted. Without that, you are flying blind.

What takes two months: one page per town or per service

A site with a homepage and a contact page can rank for one search, two at best. As soon as you want to exist on "electrician Rennes" and "electrician Saint-Malo", or on "scaling" and "implants", you need one page per topic. This is the groundwork of local SEO, and it does not get done in one evening.

The rule we impose on our clients: one page per town only if you genuinely work there and have something specific to say (jobs completed, photos, hours, access). Ten identical pages where only the town name changes: Google spots them and ignores them. Three honest pages beat fifteen copy-pasted ones.

Each page gets its own title, its own description and, in Wix, its own short URL without accents.

Count on 300 to 500 words per page, a real photo (not stock), a form or a call button, and a link from the menu or the footer. In our projects, a tradesperson who publishes two serious pages a month sees the first local searches climb to page 1 after six to ten weeks.

Not before, and nobody honest will promise you better.

The mistakes we correct most often

A telling example: a physiotherapy practice we look after had a clean, good-looking, fast Wix site. Homepage title: "Practice". No town anywhere except on an image of the access map.

Address written differently on the site, on the Google profile and in the local directory. Result: nowhere to be found on "physio" followed by the name of the town, while a colleague with a visibly weaker site held first place.

We rewrote six titles and six descriptions, put the address as text in the footer, completed the structured data and aligned the three listings. Two hours of work. The site went from page 3 to page 1 on its main search in a little over a month, without writing a single extra line of content. The other mistakes we see on repeat:

• Service pages lumped into one "Our services" block on the homepage, so no dedicated page to rank.

• A different phone number between the site, the Google profile and the directories, usually because an old number is still lying around somewhere.

• Photos named "IMG_4532.jpg" with no alt text, when Wix lets you set both in one click.

• A site "under construction" for a year in the SEO settings, with the "hide from search engines" box still ticked.

Where to start

1. Open "SEO Settings" in the Wix dashboard and rewrite your homepage title and description with the trade, the town and your name.

2. Put your name, address and phone number as text in the footer, identical to your Google profile.

3. Complete the "Local business" structured data on the homepage: type of activity, address, hours, area served.

4. Connect Search Console from Wix and note your current positions on three "trade + town" searches: that is your starting point.

5. Plan one page per service or per town, one or two a month, starting with the one that brings you the most customers.

What we take away

Local SEO on Wix runs at two speeds. Two hours are enough to stop sabotaging yourself: titles, descriptions, identical contact details everywhere, structured data. Two months of serious pages, one per town or per service, then make the difference against competitors who have a site but never look after it.

In the jungle of local results, the biggest player does not win; the one whose site says clearly who they are and where they are does.

None of these settings require technical skills, only method and a bit of discipline about keeping information consistent.

Would you rather we handled it? We set it up for you: audit of titles and descriptions, structured data, alignment with your Google profile and a plan of the local pages to create, on your existing Wix site. Book a slot with les défricheurs agency or discover our Wix services.