Most advice about ranking locally is opinion. Someone tells you to put your town in the page title, someone else tells you that stopped working years ago, and neither of them shows you anything.
So we went and looked. We took one ordinary local search, the kind a business owner types when they need a supplier, and read every one of the first 100 results Google returned. Then we did it again an hour later to see what had moved.
This is what we found, and what it means if you want your own business to show up for searches in your area.
How we did it
The search was “web design Coventry”. We chose it because it is our own market, so we could sanity check what we were looking at. We collected the first 100 organic results on desktop, with the search location set to Coventry, on 9 October 2026, and repeated the same search roughly an hour later.
For each result we recorded the page title, the web address, the description Google showed, and whether it was a homepage or a page deeper in a site. We ignored adverts and the map pack. One search in one city is a small sample, so treat the numbers as a snapshot and the patterns as the useful part.
Nearly everyone names the place. Far fewer name the search.
89 of the 100 results had “Coventry” in the page title. That is close to universal, and the handful without it were mostly social media profiles and videos.
But only 26 used the phrase people actually type, “web design Coventry”, in that order. In the top ten, six did, and five of those put it at the very start of the title.
The gap between those two numbers is the interesting part. Mentioning your town is the entry fee. Matching the words of the search is far less common, and it is noticeably more common at the top of the page than further down.
You do not need your homepage to rank
Only 14 of the 100 results were homepages. The rest were individual pages: a service page, a location page or an article.
Homepages still punched above their weight. Three of those 14 sat in positions one, two and six. But seven of the top ten were ordinary inner pages, and just over half of all 100 results (52) had the town’s name in the page address itself.
For a business that offers several services, or works in more than one town, that matters. A well built page about one service in one place can compete with a whole website dedicated to it.
Keyword domains win on volume, not position
A quarter of the results came from websites with “coventry” in the domain name. Three such sites alone held 16 of the 100 places between them, appearing again and again with different pages.
Only one of them made the top ten. They take up a lot of room lower down, which makes the results look more crowded than they are: 100 results, but only 74 different websites. A keyword in your domain is not what gets you to the top.
Fifteen places belong to someone else’s website
By our count, 15 of the 100 results were not businesses’ own websites at all. They were directories, social media profiles, videos and “top agencies” lists. Two of them were in the top ten.
You cannot outrank a national directory by wishing it away, but you can be in it. If a directory or a profile page ranks for your search, a complete and accurate listing there is a second route to the same customer. This is also where your Google Business Profile earns its keep, which we cover in our guide to SEO, AEO, GEO and local SEO.
Only one result out of 100 showed a price
This was the finding we did not expect. Exactly one of the 100 descriptions mentioned a price. It was the result in first place.
One result proves nothing about cause, and we are not claiming that publishing a price is what put it there. What it does show is how rare it is. Ninety-nine businesses competing for the same click all chose to say some version of “professional, bespoke, affordable”, and one gave the searcher a number. If you were scanning that page, you would notice which one.
The top barely moves. Further down is another story.
When we repeated the search an hour later, the top ten were the same pages in exactly the same order. Across all 100 results, 98 were still there, and the average page had moved by about one place.
That stability is not universal. Over the same hour, one of our own pages on a different search moved 14 places. Positions near the top of an established search tend to hold still, while the middle of the pack can shift between one check and the next.
The practical lesson is to stop checking your ranking every day. A single position on a single day tells you very little. The trend over weeks is what tells you whether your work is paying off.
What to do with this
If you run a local business and want to be found, the patterns above point to a short list:
- Put the service and the place in your page title, in the words your customers use, and put them first.
- Give each main service its own page instead of relying on your homepage to rank for everything.
- Do not buy a keyword domain expecting it to do the work for you.
- Find out which directories and profiles rank for your search, and make sure your listings there are complete.
- Consider saying something specific in your description, such as a starting price, that nobody else on the page is saying.
- Judge your rankings over weeks, not days.
None of this replaces the slower work of earning links, reviews and a reputation. It does mean the basics are checkable, and that many of the businesses competing with you have not done them.
If you want to see where your own website stands, our free website audit shows how you appear on Google and in AI search. If you would rather have it handled for you, read about our SEO services in Coventry.
