Word of mouth still runs Suffolk. It just ends somewhere different now.

Ask a builder in Stowmarket, a garage in Needham Market or an accountant in Bury where the work comes from and you get the same answer. Recommendations. Someone told someone.

That has not changed and it is not going to. What has changed is what happens in the ninety seconds after the recommendation.

Someone mentions your name at the school gate, or over a pint. The other person nods, says thanks, and then does what everyone does now. They get their phone out and look you up before they ring.

That search is the real interview. The recommendation only got you as far as the door.

What they are actually doing

They are not reading your about page. They are checking you exist and that you are still trading.

Typically that means a Google search of your business name, a glance at whatever comes back, and a decision made in a few seconds. Sometimes it is a look at your Facebook page instead, because that is what turned up first. Occasionally it is a scroll through your reviews.

None of it is deep research. It is a quick sanity check on someone else's judgement, and the bar is low. But it is a bar, and plenty of good local businesses fall under it without ever knowing.

You never hear about the ones that fail. There is no email saying "I was going to call you but your site was down". The call just does not come, and the week carries on looking normal.

Where it usually breaks

Three things account for most of it.

The first is a Facebook page that has not been touched in two years. To you that is just a page you stopped bothering with. To someone who has never met you, a business that went quiet in 2023 reads as a business that might have stopped.

The second is speed. A site that loads fine on the office wifi can take eight or nine seconds on mobile data outside the Co-op, and that is where people are standing when they look you up. Most of the weight is images that were never resized, dropped in at 4000 pixels wide because that is what the camera produced.

The third is the phone number. It is astonishing how often the number on the website is the old landline, or it is baked into an image so it cannot be tapped. Someone standing in a car park with one hand free is not going to write it down.

The bit most people miss

Your Google Business Profile is doing more work than your website in this moment, and it is free.

When someone searches your name on a phone, that panel is what fills the screen. Opening hours, phone number, photos, reviews, whether you are open right now. If it says you close at 5pm and you changed to 4.30 last spring, that is the information being used.

Fill it in properly. Real opening hours, correct phone number, the service area you actually cover, and photographs of your own work rather than stock images of somebody else's. Ten recent photos beat a professional shoot from 2019, because they show a business that is currently doing things.

Reviews matter here too, but not in the way people assume. Nobody expects a perfect score. What they are looking for is recency. Four reviews from this year does more than forty from four years ago, because it answers the only question they are actually asking, which is whether you are still any good now.

Asking for them is the awkward bit. The trick is to ask once, in person, at the moment the customer is pleased, and to send the direct link that afternoon rather than saying "leave us a review sometime".

Why this bites harder round here

In a city, most enquiries start with a search for the service. Someone types "electrician near me" and picks from what comes up. Ranking for that phrase is the whole game.

Suffolk works differently. A lot of trade here still starts with a name, because the county is small and people talk. That should be an advantage, and it is, right up until the search that follows the recommendation.

It means the fix is different too. You do not necessarily need to outrank a national firm on a competitive keyword. You need the search for your own name to land well. That is a much smaller and cheaper job, and it is the one being skipped.

Try this today

Take your phone, turn the wifi off so you are on mobile data, and search your business name.

Watch what loads and how long it takes. Look at what fills the screen first. Try tapping the phone number. Check whether the top result is your own site, an old Facebook page, a directory listing you forgot about, or a competitor.

Whatever you see in those first ten seconds is what the person who was recommended you saw. That is the honest version, not the one you get sitting at your desk with the site already cached.

Most of what you find will be fixable in an afternoon. Resize the images, correct the number, update the Google profile, post something so the Facebook page shows a sign of life.

Do that before you spend anything on ads. There is no sense paying to send more people to a place that is already losing the ones you get for free.

We are based in Great Finborough, just outside Stowmarket, and most of what we do is for businesses within about an hour of here. If you want a second opinion on what your name looks like when someone searches it, ring us on 01449 541255. It is a ten minute conversation and we will tell you straight if there is nothing to fix.