What is local SEO?

What local SEO actually means

Regular SEO is about ranking for searches anywhere. Local SEO is about ranking for searches with a place in them, stated or not. “Commercial cleaning Sandton” has a place. “Plumber near me” has one too: wherever the phone is.

For those searches, Google usually shows a map with three businesses before the normal results. That map pack is where a lot of calls start, which is why, for a local service business, the Google Business Profile is often half the SEO game. Usually the faster half.

How Google decides who shows up locally

Google’s guide to local ranking names three things: relevance (how well your profile matches the search), distance (how far you are from the searcher) and prominence (how well known your business is). It also says there’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.

You can’t change distance. You can improve relevance by describing your business accurately and completely, and prominence by earning reviews, mentions and links. That’s local SEO in two sentences. The rest is doing it properly.

The four jobs that matter most

1. A complete Google Business Profile: the right categories, every service, accurate hours, real photos, a clear description.
2. Genuine reviews, coming in steadily, each one answered.
3. Consistent details: the same business name, address and phone number on your website, profile and directories.
4. Website pages for each main service, and for each area you genuinely work in, with something true and specific to say about it.

Most local businesses have done one or two of these, half-heartedly, in 2021. Doing all four properly is often enough to move up. The detail on the first two is in how to rank higher on Google Maps and how to get more Google reviews.

If customers don’t come to you

Cleaners, plumbers, contractors and consultants who visit clients are what Google calls service-area businesses. Google’s service area guidance says that if you don’t serve customers at your business address, you should remove the address from your profile and set service areas instead.

It also sets limits: up to 20 service areas, and an overall area that shouldn’t be more than about 2 hours of driving time from where you’re based. So no, you can’t list the whole country. (People have tried. Google noticed.)

Area pages: the right way and the lazy way

Pages for the areas you serve help your website back up your profile. The lazy way is twenty copies of the same page with the suburb name swapped. Google treats near-identical pages like that as doorway pages, and they can make the whole site look thin.

Rule of thumb: build an area page only where you really work and can say something true about it. Jobs you’ve done there, how fast you get there, the kind of clients you have in that area. Three good pages beat thirty empty ones.

What I’d do this week

Search for your main service plus your area on your phone. Note who’s in the map pack, then compare your profile with theirs: categories, number and age of reviews, photos, services listed. Close the biggest gap first. It costs nothing but an afternoon.

If you want the whole local side handled (profile, reviews process, area pages and the website behind them), that’s part of my SEO service.