Local SEO: the complete method, from the business profile to the map pack

Local SEO is the work of getting named when somebody nearby searches for what you sell. Google states that local results are ranked on three things: relevance, how well your profile matches the search; distance, how far you are from the searcher; and prominence, how well known the business is, which Google says includes how many websites link to you and how many reviews you have. You cannot move the searcher, so the method is to make the profile unambiguously relevant and the business demonstrably prominent.

That gives a clear order of work: the Business Profile first, then reviews, then local pages on your own site, then citations and links. This page covers each step and how to check it.

What Google says decides the ranking

Google's own page on improving your local ranking names the three factors above and explains that prominence draws on information from across the web, including links, articles and directories, as well as review count and score. Two consequences follow that most guides skip.

• Distance is measured from the searcher, not from the city centre. Your position changes as the person moves, so a single ranking number for a map pack phrase describes one point on a map. Check from several points across the area you serve.
• Prominence is partly ordinary SEO. Links, mentions and a strong site raise the profile's prominence, which is why local work and site work are not separate projects.

The Business Profile, field by field

Complete every field. A thin profile loses to a complete one in the same street. Google's guidelines for representing your business set the rules, and the ones people breach most often are worth stating plainly.

Field	What to do
Name	Your real world name exactly as it appears on your signage. Google's guidelines rule out marketing taglines, store codes, phone numbers, URLs and unnecessary legal suffixes. Keyword stuffing here is the most common cause of a suspended profile.
Primary category	The single most important field on the profile. Choose the one that completes the sentence "this business is a", not one that describes a service you offer.
Additional categories	Google asks for as few categories as possible to describe the core business. Add only those you genuinely are, since each one brings its own set of searches.
Address or service area	A precise address, or a service area where you travel to customers. No PO boxes. One profile per location, with permanent signage at the address.
Hours	Accurate hours plus special hours for holidays. Wrong hours produce negative reviews faster than anything else on the profile.
Services and products	List each service as its own entry with a real description. This is free, structured and most competitors leave it blank.
Description	750 characters describing what you do, who you serve and where. Write it for a person deciding whether to call.
Photos	Exterior shots that help somebody find the door, interior, team, work in progress, and your own logo and cover image.
Questions and answers	Post the questions customers actually ask and answer them from the business account.
Messaging and booking	Turn on only what you will answer quickly. A slow reply here is worse than no reply option.

Reviews

Reviews feed prominence directly, and they also decide whether the click becomes a call. Build a routine rather than a campaign.

• Ask every satisfied customer, at the moment the work is done. A short message with a direct review link, sent the same day, outperforms any later reminder.
• Keep the flow steady. A profile that gains a few reviews every month looks alive. Forty reviews in one week and nothing for a year looks like a campaign.
• Reply to all of them, including the good ones. Replies are public and they are read by the next customer. Answer complaints with what you did about it.
• Stay inside Google's policy. Never buy reviews, never incentivise them, and never ask only the customers you expect to be happy. Profiles that do this lose the reviews and sometimes the profile.
• Collect them off Google too. Sector platforms and industry directories are often cited by other sites, and that is part of prominence.

Local pages on your own site

Your site is where relevance is proved. Two page types do the work.

Location pages, one per physical place, each with the address, embedded map, local phone number, opening hours, parking and transport notes, the staff at that location, photos taken there, and reviews from that location. Give it a URL such as /locations/leeds/ and link it from the main navigation or footer.

Service plus area pages, one per genuine combination of what you do and where you do it. These earn their place when the content is specific to the area: jobs completed there, local requirements, response times, the neighbourhoods covered. A set of near identical pages with the place name swapped is a doorway, adds no value and is treated accordingly. Build five pages you can write properly rather than fifty you cannot.

Add LocalBusiness structured data to each location page. Google's documentation requires name and address as a minimum and recommends phone, hours, geographic coordinates and the correct subtype. There is a copyable example in our note on LocalBusiness schema.

Citations and consistency

A citation is any mention of your name, address and phone number on another site. They matter less as a ranking lever than they did and more as a consistency check: conflicting addresses across the web make it harder for Google to decide what is true about you.

• Fix the big ones first: Apple Maps, Bing Places, Facebook, your sector's main directory, and your local chamber or trade body.
• Use one exact format for the name, address and phone number everywhere, including suite numbers and abbreviations.
• Claim and correct before you create. Duplicate listings cause more damage than missing ones.
• Prefer places a human might actually read. A listing on a site your customers use is worth more than fifty on sites nobody visits.

Measuring it honestly

• Calls, direction requests and messages from the profile insights, month over month.
• Map pack position from several points across your service area, not from your own office.
• Search Console queries containing place names, which show where the site is gaining relevance.
• Review count and rating tracked monthly against your three nearest competitors.
• Revenue by location, which is the only number that settles arguments.

This page covers local search for businesses with a place or a service area. For the structured data block itself, see the LocalBusiness note linked above. For national or ecommerce search, the levers are different and worth a separate plan.

Where people get stuck on Local SEO

How long does local SEO take?

Profile improvements can show within days because the data is reindexed quickly. Review volume and prominence build over months, and a new location usually needs two or three quarters of steady work before it holds a map pack position across its area.

I work from home and visit customers. What do I do about the address?

Set yourself up as a service area business, define the areas you travel to, and follow Google's guideline to hide a residential address. You stay eligible for local results across the area you serve.

Do I need a separate page for every town I cover?

Only where you can write something true and specific about that town. Start with the places that bring real revenue, publish genuinely local content, and expand once each page has earned its traffic.

Does my website matter if most of my enquiries come from the map?

Yes. Prominence draws on links and mentions from across the web, so site quality feeds the profile. The site is also where somebody decides to trust you after they tap through.

How is local SEO priced?

Common structures are a one off profile and citation clean up, a monthly retainer covering content, reviews and reporting, or a per location fee for multi site businesses. Number of locations and competitiveness of the category drive the figure, so send one identical scope to three providers and compare the ninety day deliverable list against the price.

The other place people now ask for a local recommendation

The map pack ranks businesses near a searcher. An assistant answers in a sentence: the plumber near me with good reviews, with two or three names. It reads the same signals you have just worked on, including your profile, reviews and citations.

The difference is that it commits to a short list. Ask the question for each area you serve and see whether you make the list in each. Gaps by neighbourhood are common. AI Knows Us logs the answers by question, which gives the map pack report a companion.