What is local SEO?

How is local SEO different from ordinary SEO?

Ordinary SEO competes for a search wherever the searcher is. If someone types "how to bleed a radiator", the best page in the country wins, and it does not matter whether it was written in Kinver or Kendal.

Local SEO competes for a search that has a place attached, whether the searcher typed one or not. "Plumber Stourbridge" obviously has a place in it. "Plumber near me" has one too, supplied by the phone. So does "plumber" on its own, because Google assumes anyone typing that wants one they can actually book. For those searches, Google shows a different kind of result and uses a different set of signals to decide who appears.

That is why a mechanic in Dudley with a modest website can outrank a national chain for "MOT near me" in the local results. Google is not asking who has the biggest site. It is asking who is close, who is relevant and who is trusted.

Where do local results actually appear?

For a typical local service search there are up to four places a business can show up, and they are ranked separately.

• The local pack: the map with three businesses listed beneath it. This is driven almost entirely by Google Business Profile and reputation, and it is where most of the calls come from.
• Google Maps itself, including the app. Same data, longer list, used heavily by people who are already out and about.
• The organic results: the ordinary blue links below the map. These are driven by your website, and by the pages on it that match the search.
• AI Overviews and AI answer engines: the summary that now appears above the results for many searches. These draw on the same sources, business profiles with consistent facts and web pages that answer questions plainly, and they favour businesses that state clearly what they do, where and for how much.

A business can be first in the map and absent from the organic results, or the other way round. Doing well in both is the aim, and it is why local SEO covers both the profile and the site.

What does Google use to rank local businesses?

Google has been unusually open about this. It ranks local results on three things.

Relevance is how well your business matches what was searched for. That comes from your primary category, the services listed on your profile, and what your website says. A dental practice in Hagley that never mentions "emergency dentist" anywhere will not appear for it, however good they are.

Distance is how far you are from the searcher, or from the place they named. You cannot change where you are, but you can make sure Google knows where you work. A kitchen fitter in Kingswinford who serves a fifteen-mile radius should have a service area set on their profile and pages that say so, rather than an address that makes Google think they only work on their own street.

Prominence is how well known and well regarded the business is, online and off. Reviews are the biggest part of it. Mentions on other sites, links from other sites and the general depth of your online presence make up the rest. A garage that has been sponsoring the local junior football team for a decade and gets mentioned on the club's site has prominence a new arrival does not.

The three pillars of local SEO

Your Google Business Profile

This is the listing that appears in the map and in the panel on the right of a desktop search. It is free, it is the single most important local ranking factor, and most small businesses have never finished setting it up. The work involves choosing the right primary and secondary categories, listing services individually, keeping hours correct, adding real photographs regularly, posting updates that show the business is alive, answering questions, and replying to reviews. Video verification is now standard for new profiles and it takes a couple of weeks, so it is worth starting early.

Your website

The site does two jobs. It gives Google the detail the profile cannot hold: a page for each service, written for the person searching, with the areas covered stated plainly. And it converts the visitor once they arrive, which the profile alone cannot do. The technical side matters too: fast pages on mobile, good Core Web Vitals, and LocalBusiness structured data that tells Google your name, address, phone number, hours and service area without any room for misreading. Our web design work is built around these things from the first sketch because they are far cheaper to include than to add later.

Your reputation

Reviews, citations and links. Reviews need to arrive steadily rather than in a burst, and they need replies. Citations are the mentions of your name, address and phone number on directories, trade bodies, the council, local press and suppliers; they need to be consistent, and inconsistent ones need cleaning up. Links from other relevant local sites are slower to earn but carry real weight. We go into the review side in Do Google reviews improve local rankings?

Does my business need location pages?

Sometimes, and it is often done badly. A location page is a page on your site about the service you provide in a particular place: "Boiler repairs in Halesowen", say. They work when they are genuinely useful, with real detail about work done in that area, local photographs, directions, and something a person from Halesowen would recognise. They fail, and can hurt, when they are the same paragraph with the town name swapped, repeated for twenty towns.

The honest test is whether you would be embarrassed for a customer to read two of them side by side. If you serve Stourbridge and a handful of surrounding towns, a well-written service area section and a few strong pages for the areas where you do most of your work beat a sprawl of thin ones.

What does local SEO work actually involve?

People imagine it is a one-off. It is closer to gardening. The set-up takes a few weeks, and the growth comes from a routine kept up for months.

| Phase | What happens | Typical time | |---|---|---| | Audit | Profile, website, citations, reviews and competitors examined; the gaps listed in order of impact | 1–2 weeks | | Foundations | Profile completed and verified, categories and services corrected, citations cleaned up, structured data and page titles fixed | 2–6 weeks | | Content | Service pages written or rewritten, service area pages where warranted, real job photos and descriptions added | 4–8 weeks, then ongoing | | Reputation | Review routine set up with the team, replies written, local links pursued | Ongoing | | Measurement | Calls, direction requests, form fills and map rankings tracked monthly, and the plan adjusted | Monthly |

For a single-location business a retainer of £500 to £1,500 a month is typical for this. Below that, not enough gets done each month to move anything. The first noticeable movement usually comes at three to six months. By six to twelve, the reviews, content and links have compounded and the business tends to hold its position with less effort.

What does it look like when it works?

Your Local Mechanic, a mobile mechanic serving Dudley, Stourbridge and the Black Country, is the example we point to. A rebuilt site organised around the services people search for, a properly completed profile, structured data, a review routine and real job content. Visits from Google rose five-fold within a year, calls from the listing rose 137%, and the rating climbed from 3.6 to 4.3. The case study sets out what changed and in what order.

If you are reading this because you are not showing up at all, Why doesn't my business show up on Google? works through the causes one at a time.

Where to go next

If you would like to know where your business stands locally and what it would take to improve, we will audit the profile, the site and the competition and give you a plain list. Tell us about it. The broader SEO service covers the cases where a business needs to compete beyond its own postcode.