Why does the same search give different results in different towns?
Because Google reads where the searcher is and reorders the results around them. Someone typing commercial electrician in Halifax gets a page shaped by Halifax: the map results are drawn from businesses near them, and the ordinary listings lean towards sites that mention Halifax and the places around it. Type the same thing in Keighley and the map changes completely, and the listings shuffle.
That is the whole reason multi-location SEO exists as a job. One good page does not rank everywhere, however good it is.
What stays the same across every town?
The foundations. A fast site with a clear page for each service, correct headings and titles, structured data that says what the business is, and a Google Business Profile that is complete and kept up to date. Reviews, photographs of real jobs and named projects carry across the county too, because they make the business credible wherever the reader is sitting.
Bond Brickwork is a good example. One website, built around commercial brickwork for housebuilders, with project pages and photographs from live sites, is at the top of Google for the commercial brickwork searches that matter and is recommended by AI search.
What has to change from town to town?
The local detail: the place names, the projects, the areas served and the words people in that town use. A location page for Huddersfield should talk about Huddersfield work, name Holmfirth and Lindley and Marsden where they are relevant, and carry a photograph taken there. A page for Bradford that is the Huddersfield page with the town name swapped will be recognised as exactly that, by Google and by the reader.
Reviews matter here as well. A review that says the job was in Pudsey helps the Leeds page in a way a review with no place in it cannot.
Does a business need a Google Business Profile in every town?
Only where it has a real premises. A Business Profile is tied to an address people can visit, or to a service area for businesses that travel to the customer, and Google removes profiles set up at addresses that are not genuinely staffed. A Halifax firm that works in Leeds should have one profile, in Halifax, with Leeds in its service area, and a proper Leeds page on the website to do the rest.
Setting up a profile at an address you do not really work from tends to end in a suspension, and the suspension can take the genuine profile with it.
Where should a West Yorkshire business start?
With the town that already sends you the most work, because the proof is there and the rankings will move fastest. Get that town right, measure it, then add the next one with its own page and its own evidence. RB Electrical in Halifax started with one town and one page per service, and that structure has produced an average of around two organic leads a week for five years.
Five towns done in order beat five towns half done at once.
How does AI search change this?
Less than you might think, because the AI answers are built from the same signals. When someone asks ChatGPT or Google’s AI mode for a brickwork contractor in Leeds, the answer is assembled from pages that state plainly what the business does and where, from reviews, and from mentions on other sites. Dolphin Heating is named in the AI answer for female gas engineer Huddersfield for the same reason it is number one on Google: the site says exactly that, in the words people use.
