If people can walk into your business, or you travel to them, local search is probably the highest return work available to you. The competition is a handful of businesses in your area rather than the entire internet, and the searcher is usually ready to buy.
Local SEO is also its own discipline. A lot of general SEO advice does very little for the map pack, and a lot of local advice does very little for your website. This guide separates them.
What Google actually ranks locally
Google describes local ranking as three factors, and it is worth taking that description literally.
- Relevance: how well your profile matches what was searched
- Distance: how far you are from the searcher or the place they named
- Prominence: how well known you are, online and offline
Distance is the one you cannot fix
Proximity is the strongest factor in most local searches and you have almost no control over it. Someone standing two streets from a competitor will often see that competitor first, whatever you do.
This matters because it sets expectations honestly. You are not trying to rank first for everyone in the city. You are trying to be the obvious choice within the radius where you are genuinely the nearest good option, and to widen that radius through prominence.
It also kills a common waste of money: renting a virtual address to appear in a district you do not serve. Google's guidelines require a real staffed location, and suspended profiles are hard to recover.
Your Google Business Profile is the product page
For local search, the profile matters more than the website. Treat it as the primary asset.
Fill in every field, not the ones that feel important. Categories carry real weight, so choose the primary category precisely and add secondary ones only where they are genuinely accurate. Hours must be right, including holidays, because wrong hours produce the one review nobody recovers from.
Photos are ranked and shown by Google and they are the thing a person actually looks at before choosing. Real photos of the real place, added regularly, beat a single stock set uploaded once.
Use the products and services fields. They are underused, they are indexed, and they let you name the exact things people search for without stuffing them into your business name.
Reviews, and how to ask without being awkward
Reviews affect both ranking and whether anyone clicks. Volume, recency and rating all matter, and a steady trickle beats a burst followed by silence.
Ask in person at the moment the person is happiest, then follow up with a link. Do not gate the ask on whether they liked it, which is against Google's policy and obvious to readers. Never buy reviews.
Reply to all of them, including the good ones, and especially the bad ones. A calm, specific reply to a complaint is read by every future customer and often does more for you than the complaint did against you.
Citations: what they are and how much to care
A citation is any mention of your name, address and phone number on another site. Consistency across them is a prominence signal.
The practical version is simple. Get the big ones right, keep them identical down to the abbreviation, and stop. Apple Maps, Bing Places, Facebook, and the two or three directories that actually matter in your industry will cover most of the value.
Paying a service to spray your details across four hundred directories is mostly a waste. The long tail of directories is not read by people and is heavily discounted by search engines.
Local pages on your own site
If you serve several areas, each one can justify a page, but only if the page is real. A template with the town name swapped is thin content and gets treated as such.
A page earns its place when it contains something specific to that area: the actual work you have done there, the parking situation, the local rules you deal with, the travel time, the neighbourhoods you cover. If you cannot write three specific paragraphs, that area does not need a page yet.
Put your name, address and phone in the footer as text rather than an image, add LocalBusiness schema, and embed a map on the contact page. None of these are magic, all of them remove doubt.
What to track
Local performance has its own numbers and the website ones will mislead you if you use them alone.
- Profile views, and the split between map and search
- Calls, direction requests and website clicks from the profile
- Which search terms brought up your profile, shown in the profile's own insights
- Review count and average, tracked monthly rather than watched daily
- Rankings sampled from several points around your service area, not just your office
The order to do it in
Almost everyone does this in the wrong order and spends the first month on the lowest value part.
Claim and complete the profile first, because it is free and it is the ranking asset. Then reviews, because they compound and they take the longest to accumulate. Then the two or three citations that matter. Then your own site's local pages, and only for areas you can write honestly about. Paid ads and directories last, if at all.
Common questions
- Why do competitors outrank me when I have better reviews?
- Almost always proximity. Distance from the searcher is the strongest factor in local results and you cannot influence it. Reviews and completeness widen the radius where you win; they do not overturn someone standing next door to a competitor.
- Do I need citations on hundreds of directories?
- No. Get the handful that matter right and identical, then stop. The long tail of directories is not read by people and is heavily discounted by search engines, so paying a service to spray your details across four hundred of them is mostly wasted.
- Can I rank in a city where I do not have an office?
- Not legitimately. Google requires a real staffed location, and virtual addresses are a common cause of suspension. Service-area businesses can set a service area instead, which is the supported way to cover places you travel to.
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