Local SEO: twenty things that move the map pack

The first four items below are worth more than the other sixteen put together. Local ranking is dominated by the Google Business Profile, by proximity, and by whether your name, address and phone match everywhere they appear.

Work in this order.

The four that matter

1. Claim and complete the Business Profile. Every field. Categories, description, hours, service areas, attributes, products. The map results are built from the profile, and not from your website. A business with a good site and a half-filled profile has given the ranking almost nothing to read.

2. Pick the primary category precisely. This is the single strongest lever in the profile. “Dentist” and “Cosmetic dentist” surface for different searches, and the primary category carries far more weight than the secondary ones.

3. Make the name, address and phone identical everywhere. Your site, the profile, the directories, your invoices. “Suite 4” and “Ste 4” are different strings to a matching algorithm. Pick one format and use it exactly.

4. Get reviews continuously, and reply to them. Volume, recency and rating all show, and a steady trickle reads better than forty in one week. Ask after the work is done, in person or in the follow-up email.

The website side

5. Put the full address and phone in the site footer, in text, not in an image.

6. Mark it up with LocalBusiness structured data, and validate it.

7. Build a page per location if you have several, each with its own address, hours, staff and photos. A page that differs only by a swapped city name is a doorway page and is treated as one.

8. Build a page per service, and mention where you do it, in the way a customer would say it.

9. Embed a map on the contact page, lazily so it does not block the load.

10. Make the phone number a tel: link so it dials on a tap.

The content side

11. Write about the specific area. Not “serving greater Manchester”, but the actual streets, landmarks and neighbourhood names a local would use.

12. Answer the questions people ask before calling. Parking. Opening on a Sunday. Whether you come to them.

13. Put real photographs of the real place on the site and in the profile. Stock photos of an office nobody works in are recognisable.

The off-site side

14. List on the directories that matter in your country and industry, with the exact same details.

15. Fix or remove old listings with an old address. A closed listing with a former address actively confuses the matching.

16. Get mentioned by local organisations. A sponsorship, a supplier directory, a local news piece.

17. Ask suppliers and partners who list their stockists to list you correctly.

The maintenance side

18. Update hours before every holiday. A profile showing “open” when you are closed produces a bad review that outlives the holiday.

19. Post to the profile occasionally. Offers, events, changes. It is a minor signal and it takes minutes.

20. Check the profile monthly for edits you did not make. Anyone can suggest a change to your hours or category, and suggestions get accepted.

The test

Search your main service plus your town, from a phone, not logged in, with location on. Then do it from two miles away. Proximity changes what you see. Know how far your visibility actually reaches. That is what separates a useful local strategy from a report full of rankings nobody in your town would see.

If the profile is the problem, fixing it is usually a week of work and it moves more than a quarter of content would. We cover it inside SEO.