Northill and its neighbour Ickwell are two of the smallest places in this list, and that changes the advice slightly from what works in a bigger town.
Northill is a genuinely small village, and next door Ickwell is known locally for its historic maypole on the green — one of the few permanent ones left in the country, and the kind of detail that makes the area feel more distinct than a lot of the flatter, more anonymous villages nearby.
Being this small changes the SEO advice in a useful way: you're not fighting dozens of competitors for "plumber Northill," because there simply isn't the search volume to support that kind of competition. The businesses that do reasonably well here tend to set their Google Business Profile's service area to cover Northill, Ickwell and the wider stretch out toward Biggleswade and Old Warden, rather than trying to rank for the village name alone — because that's genuinely where most of the actual search volume sits, even from people who live five minutes from you.
A website that mentions the surrounding villages by name, rather than just the one you're technically in, tends to do noticeably better here than one that doesn't — simply because it matches how people nearby actually search.