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Local SEO

In this lesson

Section titled “In this lesson”
  • Explain the three factors that Google names for local results: relevance, distance and prominence.
  • Set up a Google Business Profile that follows Google’s rules for names, addresses, categories and service areas.
  • Check NAP consistency and local citations, and tell a real problem from a harmless variation.
  • Plan a steady, honest flow of reviews, and recognize review practices that break the rules.
  • Plan location pages and profiles for a business with many locations.

What local search is

Section titled “What local search is”

Local search is a search where the best result is a place near the searcher. Examples are “dentist”, “coffee near me” and “plumber Leeds”. A person does not always type a place. Google can see local intent in the word “dentist” alone, and it uses the searcher’s location.

Local searches show two kinds of results:

  • The local pack: a block of business listings next to a map, usually three. Each listing comes from a Google Business Profile, not from a web page. A link below the pack opens more places in Google Maps.
  • The local organic results: the normal blue links below the pack. These are web pages, ranked as you learned on day 01.

The two need different work. The pack depends mostly on the Business Profile, reviews and distance. The organic results depend mostly on the website: pages, content and links. A local business needs both.

How Google ranks local results

Section titled “How Google ranks local results”

Google names three factors in its Business Profile help:

Factor What it means
Relevance How well a profile matches the search. Complete, detailed information helps.
Distance How far the business is from the searcher, or from the place in the query.
Prominence How well-known the business is. Links, reviews and ratings add to it.

The help page also uses the word “popularity” for the third factor, in one sentence. Google says that you cannot request or pay for a better local ranking. It keeps the details secret.

Distance is the factor that you cannot change. A business does not rank the same across a city. It ranks well near its address and worse far away. So a rank tracker for local SEO checks many points on a map, not one rank. This is a geo-grid. BrightLocal uses this name, and Whitespark calls it a local ranking grid.

What the experts think matters most

Section titled “What the experts think matters most”

Google gives no weights, so the industry uses surveys. The Whitespark Local Search Ranking Factors report (6 November 2025) asked 47 local SEO experts to score 187 factors. It is opinion, not Google data, and the report says that no expert has inside access. The top five factors for the local pack were:

  1. Primary Business Profile category
  2. Distance from the searcher to the business
  3. Keywords in the business name on the profile
  4. A physical address in the city of the search
  5. The business is open at the time of the search

High ratings, the number of Google reviews, the recency of reviews and a steady flow of reviews were all in the top 15.

Notice factor 3. Keywords in the name help, but Google’s guidelines forbid any extra words in the name. “Smile Dental – Emergency Dentist Leeds” can get the profile suspended. Use the real name from your sign.

For local organic results, the top factor was a dedicated page for each service, then city or neighbourhood words in the content. That is the website side, which you will see in “Local landing pages”.

Toy model with example data and invented weights. Move the searcher across town and watch the pack change. Then choose 'emergency dentist': your clinic (Y) drops out near the centre. Tick the category box and notice that relevance brings it back.

Google Business Profile

Section titled “Google Business Profile”

A Google Business Profile is a free listing for a business in Google Search and Maps. It shows the name, address, hours, phone, photos and reviews. It is the most important asset in local SEO, because the pack shows profiles, not pages.

Google’s tips to rank better are short: verify the profile, keep information complete and current, reply to reviews, and add photos. Retail stores in some countries can also show in-store products.

The guidelines give strict rules. The main ones:

  • Name. Use the real-world name from your sign, website and stationery. Do not add taglines, places, services or phone numbers.
  • Address. Use a real place with permanent signs. A P.O. box or a virtual office is not allowed. A co-working desk is allowed only if it has signs and staff during business hours.
  • Service area. A service-area business goes to its customers, for example a plumber. It hides its address and sets a service area. Google says the area should not reach farther than about two hours of driving. A hybrid business, such as a garage with roadside help, can show an address and a service area.
  • Categories. Choose the fewest categories that describe the core business. Each must finish the sentence “This business IS a”, not “HAS a”. The primary category is the most important one.
  • One profile per business. Do not make two profiles for one location. Departments and individual practitioners, such as doctors, can have their own profiles.
  • Description. No links, no prices and no sales offers.

Break these rules and Google can suspend the profile. A suspended profile is gone from the pack.

NAP consistency

Section titled “NAP consistency”

NAP means name, address and phone number. NAP consistency means that these three details are the same on your profile, your website and other sites. Each copy confirms the others. A copy that does not match makes Google less sure which data is correct.

Not every difference is a problem. Google normalizes common variations. Whitespark lists many that are safe: “Street” and “St”, “Suite” and “Ste”, “(555) 555-5555” and “555-555-5555”. The roadmap’s example of “St.” and “Street” is one of these harmless cases.

Real problems are differences in fact:

  • An old address after a move.
  • An old phone number, or a call-tracking number on some sites.
  • A different name, such as a former brand name.
  • Two profiles for the same place.

Start with your own website. The Whitespark survey ranks “the NAP on the website matches the profile NAP” 15th for the local pack. Put the full NAP in the HTML text, not in an image. Add LocalBusiness structured data with the same details. Google’s docs say to use the most specific subtype, for example Dentist or Restaurant. You learned structured data on day 05b.

Local citations

Section titled “Local citations”

A local citation is a mention of a business’s NAP on another website. It does not need a link. Citations are the local form of the entity consistency that you learned on day 06b.

There are two kinds:

  • Structured citations are business listings in directories and apps, such as Bing Places, Apple Maps, Yelp and industry directories.
  • Unstructured citations are mentions in other text, such as a news article, a blog post or a list of local sponsors.

The most important places are the other map platforms. The Whitespark survey ranks consistent data on Google Maps, Bing Maps and Apple Maps 28th, well above general directories.

Citations lost value for classic rankings over ten years. But the 2026 survey says that AI search gives them new value. Three of the top five factors for AI visibility were citation factors. The first was a place on expert “best of” lists. This is the same idea as day 06b: AI systems read about you on other sites. Mass submission to low-quality directories is still useless, and it can count as link spam.

Reviews and review velocity

Section titled “Reviews and review velocity”

Reviews affect both ranking and the choice of the customer. Google says that more reviews and positive ratings can help local ranking. BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 asked 1,002 US adults:

  • 47% will not use a business with fewer than 20 reviews.
  • 74% look for reviews from the last three months.
  • 68% will only use a business with four stars or more.
  • 45% used ChatGPT or other AI tools for local recommendations, up from 6% the year before.

Review velocity is how fast new reviews arrive over time. Recency matters to customers, and the experts rank it 11th. A steady flow beats bursts: “sustained influx of reviews over time (rather than bursts)” ranked 14th. A steady flow also looks natural. Google’s policy removes content with “unusual volumes or patterns of review contributions”.

The honest way to get a steady flow is to ask every customer. Google gives a review link and a QR code for this.

Google’s policy forbids these practices:

  • Paying for reviews, or giving discounts or free goods for them.
  • Asking only happy customers. Google calls this “selectively solicit positive reviews”. The industry calls it review gating.
  • Reviews by staff, owners or anyone with a conflict of interest.
  • Asking staff to collect a number of reviews, or asking for specific content.
  • Reviews on a competitor’s profile to harm it.

In the US, the FTC’s rule on fake reviews (announced 14 August 2024) adds legal risk. It bans fake reviews, incentives that depend on a positive or negative review, undisclosed insider reviews and review suppression by threats.

Reply to reviews, both good and bad. Google says replies show that you listen. Keep replies short and do not use them for promotions. The Whitespark survey calls keywords in owner replies a myth.

How the business gets reviews

Example data. Choose each plan and move the month slider. Notice that the campaign gives the most reviews at first but almost none recently. The bought reviews make a spike that looks unlike the other months.
Section titled “Local links”

Local links are backlinks from websites in the same area: local news, business associations, chambers of commerce, schools, clubs and event pages. They add prominence, and they show that the business is real and part of a place. The Whitespark survey ranks links from locally relevant sites 26th and 27th for the pack.

Good sources come from real local activity:

  • Sponsor a local team or event.
  • Join the local business association.
  • Give local press a story or data, as in digital PR on day 06.
  • Work with nearby businesses that are not competitors.

The rules from day 06 still apply. A link that you pay for, including a sponsorship link, needs rel="sponsored" or nofollow. Such a link still helps people find you, and the mention is still a citation.

Local landing pages

Section titled “Local landing pages”

A local landing page is a page for one location or one service area. The roadmap file for this item has the wrong text; it describes local signals in general. This lesson uses the meaning of the item name.

The page linked from the Business Profile is the most important page. Experts call it the GBP landing page. For one location, it is usually the home page. Its title and headings matter: keywords in them ranked 4th and 8th for local organic results.

Two kinds of pages help:

  • Service pages. One page for each main service. This was the top local organic factor in the survey, and second for AI visibility.
  • Location pages. One page for each real location, with its own NAP, hours, map, photos, staff and reviews.

Know the risk. Google’s spam policies list “pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page” as doorway abuse. A page for each town in a list, with only the town name changed, is a doorway. A page for a real location with real local content is not. You learned doorways on day 02.

Multi-location SEO

Section titled “Multi-location SEO”

Multi-location SEO is local SEO for a business with many locations, or many service areas with separate staff. The rule is: one entity for each location, with the same brand.

  • Profiles. Make one profile for each location. All locations in a country use the same name, unless signs really differ. All locations that give the same service share the same primary category.
  • Bulk verification. With 10 or more locations of one business, Google lets you verify the profiles in bulk.
  • Service areas. A service-area business can have more than one profile only if each location has its own service area and its own staff.
  • Pages. Give each profile its own location page, and link the profile to it, not to the home page. Link all location pages from a store locator with normal HTML links, so that crawlers can find them. You learned crawlable links on day 03.
  • Data. Keep the facts of hundreds of locations in one system. A change of hours must reach the profiles, pages and citations together.

Local SEO tools

Section titled “Local SEO tools”

Two tools from the roadmap, with facts from their own pages on 20 October 2026:

Tool What it does Price (20 October 2026)
BrightLocal Local rank tracking with a geo-grid, local audits, citation building and syncing, review monitoring and requests, and a local AI visibility tracker One location: Track $41, Manage $54, Grow $65 a month (less when billed yearly)
Whitespark Local ranking grids, a local rank tracker, a citation finder, a review tool, and listing services. It publishes the Local Search Ranking Factors report Sold as separate tools: grids from $10, rank tracker $14 to $200, citation finder $33 to $149 a month

Both have free tools too. For one location, a free Business Profile and a spreadsheet of your citations can do most of the work. The tools save time at many locations.

Key terms

Section titled “Key terms”
  • Local search: a search where the best result is a place near the searcher.
  • Local pack: the block of business listings with a map in local results, usually three.
  • Geo-grid: a set of rank checks from many points on a map, to show how rank changes with distance.
  • Google Business Profile: Google’s free listing for a business in Search and Maps.
  • Primary category: the main Business Profile category; it says what the business is.
  • Service-area business: a business that goes to its customers, and hides its address on its profile.
  • NAP: a business’s name, address and phone number.
  • NAP consistency: the same NAP on the profile, the website and other sites.
  • Local citation: a mention of a business’s NAP on another website, with or without a link.
  • Review velocity: how fast new reviews arrive over time.
  • Review gating: asking only happy customers for reviews; Google forbids it.
  • Local links: backlinks from websites in the same area.
  • GBP landing page: the website page that the Business Profile links to.
  • Doorway abuse: many similar pages made to rank for places or queries, which send users to one page.

Exercise

Section titled “Exercise”

Exercise · about 15 min

Audit the local presence of one business

Pick a local business with one location, for example a café or a dentist near you. You need only a browser.

  1. Search for its name on Google and open its Business Profile. Write down the name, address, phone and primary category.
  2. Check the name. Does it have extra words that are not on the sign, such as a city or a service?
  3. Open the business’s website. Find the NAP. Compare it with the profile. Write down each real difference.
  4. Search for the business on Bing Maps and Apple Maps (or Yelp). Compare the NAP again.
  5. Open the reviews on Google and sort by newest. Count the reviews from the last three months. Check that the owner replies.
  6. Search for its main service without its name, for example “dentist”, from its street. Is it in the local pack?
  7. Write three fixes in order of importance.
Show a possible solution

A typical result for a small café:

  • The profile name is “Bean There Café – Best Coffee Leeds”. The extra words break Google’s name rules and risk a suspension. Fix this first.
  • The website footer has an old phone number. The profile has the new one. This is a real difference; fix it on the website.
  • Apple Maps shows “Bean There Cafe, 12 Park St”. The profile says “12 Park Street”. This difference is harmless.
  • The café has 140 reviews, but only 2 in the last three months, and no owner replies. Start to ask every customer with a QR code at the till, and reply to new reviews.
  • The café is in the pack for “coffee” on its street, but not two streets away. That is distance, which no fix can change.

Fixes in order: the name, the phone number on the website, a steady flow of reviews with replies.

Check yourself

Section titled “Check yourself”
A plumber works from home and goes to customers. What should the Business Profile show?
Your profile says '24 High Street' and a directory says '24 High St'. A citation tool marks this as an error. What do you do?
A salon has 300 reviews, all from a campaign two years ago. A competitor has 60 reviews, with 5 new ones each month. Which statement is best?
A roofing company wants to rank in 40 towns. It has one office. It plans 40 pages that are the same except for the town name. What is the risk?
In the local pack diagram, your clinic drops out of the pack for 'emergency dentist' near the centre of town. Which change brought it back, and why?

Sources

Section titled “Sources”

Next

Section titled “Next”

Day 09b covers international SEO with hreflang and domain choices, and special kinds of search: video, e-commerce, news and Google Discover.