Local SEO

How local results are decided

Google says local ranking comes down to three things: relevance, distance and prominence (its help page now calls the third one popularity). Relevance is how well your profile and site match what was searched. Distance is how far you are from the searcher or from the place named in the query. Prominence is how well known you are, judged from reviews, links, mentions and how your site performs in regular search.

You cannot move the searcher. Everything else is in your control: how clearly your profile says what you do, whether your site backs it up, and whether the rest of the web agrees on your name, address and phone number. That is the whole job, and it is why a local SEO company that only touches your profile gets half the result.

Two things changed in the last two years. AI answers in Google and in assistants such as ChatGPT now answer "best plumber near me" style questions by drawing on the same profile, review and citation data, so consistency matters beyond the map pack. And Google keeps trimming profile features, so the fundamentals carry more weight than any single feature.

What our local SEO services include, step by step

1. Local audit. We check every profile you own (and any you do not know you own), the categories and attributes chosen, the address and phone number on your site against the profile, the top directories in your industry and country, your review count and response rate against the businesses currently in the map pack for your main searches, and where you rank from different points across your service area.
2. Profile repair. Primary and secondary categories, services with descriptions, hours and holiday hours, phone, website link to the right page, photos, products, attributes and a description that says what you do and where. Duplicates are merged or removed. Suspended profiles go through reinstatement with the cause fixed first.
3. Site alignment. Your name, address and phone appear on the site exactly as they do on the profile, in text rather than in an image, with LocalBusiness schema that matches. The profile links to a page about the location, not a generic home page, where you have more than one.
4. Location and service pages. One useful page per place you genuinely serve, built the way described below.
5. Citations. Details corrected on the directories that matter for your industry and region, and wrong or duplicate listings cleaned up. We do not submit to hundreds of directories; a short consistent list beats a long messy one.
6. Review process. A simple way to ask every customer at the right moment, a person who answers every review, and a monthly look at what reviews say about the business.
7. Tracking. Profile performance (calls, direction requests, website clicks, views by search type), Search Console for the location pages, call tracking where phone leads matter, and leads tied back to the source.
8. Monthly maintenance. Profiles get edited by Google, by users and by well meaning staff. We check for unwanted changes, new duplicates, review spam and category drift every month.

Google Business Profile in detail

The primary category is the single largest decision on the profile. It decides which searches you can appear for at all. A clinic listed as "medical clinic" and a clinic listed as "physiotherapist" show up for different queries even if everything else is identical. We choose it from what your best customers search, not from what sounds broadest, and add secondary categories only where you really offer the service.

After that, in order of effect: services and their descriptions, an accurate address or service area, hours that are actually kept, a phone number that a person answers, photos taken at your premises rather than stock, and posts or product listings where they fit the business. Attributes (wheelchair access, online appointments, women-owned and so on) are small individually and add up.

Service-area businesses, such as trades that travel to the customer, should hide the address and set the areas they serve. Showing a home address or a virtual office is a common cause of suspension.

We work inside your Google account or as a manager you add to it. The profile stays yours. If we part ways, we remove ourselves; we never hold a profile hostage.

Location pages that are not doorway pages

A page for every city that changes only the city name is what Google's spam policies describe as doorway pages, and it is also useless to the reader. A location page earns its place by answering what someone in that place would ask: which neighbourhoods or towns you cover, how quickly you can be there, the local rules or conditions that affect the work, projects or customers in the area (with permission), the team members who serve it, parking and directions for a premises, and the questions your front desk answers every week.

Our rule is simple. If we cannot write at least a few hundred words that are true only of that location, that location does not need its own page yet. It gets a section on a service-area page instead. Fewer pages, each one worth reading, outperform a hundred thin ones and do not put the whole site at risk.

For a single-location business, the home page usually is the location page. It needs the address in text, the service list, the areas covered and the schema, and it should be the page the profile links to.

Reviews and citations

Reviews affect ranking, they affect whether someone clicks, and increasingly they are what AI assistants summarise when asked whether a business is any good. A steady flow of genuine reviews, each answered by a person, matters more than a one-off burst, which can look manufactured and can trigger filtering.

We set up the ask: a short link, a moment in your process where it is natural to send it, and wording that does not steer people. Google's rules prohibit selectively asking only happy customers or discouraging negative reviews, so we do not gate reviews, and we never write or buy them. Negative reviews get a calm, factual reply, which future customers read as carefully as the review itself.

Citations are the listings of your name, address and phone number on other sites. Industry surveys put their direct ranking weight fairly low now, but inconsistent data still costs you in two ways: Google trusts your profile less, and AI answers that assemble local information from many sources get confused about who and where you are. We fix the listings that matter, remove duplicates, and leave the rest alone.

What we need from you

• Manager access to your Google Business Profile, or the login if the profile was set up by a previous agency and you do not have access. Recovering access is often the first task.
• The facts: every location, its real hours, the phone number that gets answered, the services offered at each site, and any past names or addresses the business has used.
• Photos of the premises, the team and the work, or a morning when we can take them.
• A person who can answer reviews, or approval for us to draft replies for someone to post.
• Access to Search Console and analytics, and a way to change the site, so the address, schema and location pages can be fixed.
• Honesty about history: suspensions, fake reviews bought by a past provider, and duplicate profiles. These are fixable, but only if we know.

What local SEO can and cannot achieve

It can get a business into the map pack for the searches it deserves to appear for, in the areas it genuinely serves. It can turn a profile with wrong hours and three reviews into one that converts. It can stop a suspended or duplicated listing from costing you calls every day. For most service businesses, it is the highest-return search work available because the searcher is ready to act.

It cannot make you appear in the map pack for a city you are not in or do not serve. Distance is a hard limit that no amount of optimisation removes. It cannot make a business with poor reviews outrank one with excellent ones for long. And it cannot get around a suspension caused by a profile that breaks Google's guidelines; the cause has to be fixed, and reinstatement can take weeks with no fixed timeline.

We will tell you on the audit call which of your target searches are realistic and which are not, and what changes in the business (a second location, a real office in the area) would change that answer.

How the work is measured

• Profile actions: calls, direction requests, website clicks and messages from the profile's performance report, month on month and against the same month last year where the history exists.
• Map pack presence: position checks from a set of points across the service area, not from one spot, because local results change block by block.
• Location page performance: impressions, clicks and queries per page in Search Console.
• Reviews: count, average, velocity and response rate, compared with the businesses in the pack.
• Leads: tracked calls, form fills and bookings attributed to the profile and the location pages, and revenue where your booking or CRM system can tell us.

These appear in the monthly report with what we changed and when, so a jump in direction requests can be tied to the category change that caused it. See the sample report and the analytics and reporting page for the format.

Common failure modes

• Wrong primary category. The most common single problem. The profile is complete and beautiful and shows up for the wrong searches.
• The site disagrees with the profile. An old phone number in the footer, a suite number on one and not the other, a former trading name on the directories.
• Address shown for a business that travels. Suspension follows, often months later, after a competitor reports it.
• Review bursts. Forty reviews in a week after two years of none. Some get filtered and the pattern is remembered.
• Thin city pages. Twenty pages that differ only by place name, which hurt the whole site's standing and rarely rank.
• Tracking numbers that break consistency. A call-tracking number used as the only number everywhere, so the real number disappears from the web. Google's guidelines require a number under the business's direct control that does not redirect elsewhere, so keep the real local number on the profile and the site and use tracking where it does not replace it.
• Nobody answers reviews. Especially the bad ones, which then become the only voice on the profile.
• Profile edits from strangers. Google accepts suggested edits from the public. Hours, categories and even the website link can change without you noticing, which is why monthly checks exist.

Deliverables

How it runs

1. AuditProfiles, site, citations, reviews and positions across the service area, compared with who is in the pack today.
2. Fix the profileCategory first, then everything else complete and correct. Duplicates and suspensions handled.
3. Align the siteMatching details, schema and a real page for each location.
4. Grow reviewsA simple, honest ask and a person who replies.
5. Maintain and measureMonthly checks for unwanted changes, and a report tied to calls and leads.

Which plan includes it

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