Local SEO is a different job from ranking a web page, and confusing the two is why most service businesses stall. This guide covers the sequence we run, in order.
The three things the map pack is ranked on
Google states them openly:
- Relevance. How well your Google Business Profile matches the search.
- Distance. How far you are from the searcher or from the place searched.
- Prominence. How well known you are, including reviews, citations and links.
Your website is an input into relevance and prominence. It is not the main one, which is why a good site can rank organically and still be invisible in the map.
Step 1: the Google Business Profile
This is the most valuable asset you own and most profiles are half filled in.
Primary category. More important than everything else combined. Find what the businesses currently in the map pack use and match it. The detail is in how to choose Google Business Profile categories.
Secondary categories. Three to five that genuinely describe what you sell. Not all ten.
Services. Free text, written by you, and badly underused. List the services people actually search for, with a real description each.
Service areas. If you go to customers, set these properly. If customers come to you, use the address.
Attributes, hours, holiday hours. Small signals, quick to set, and wrong hours cost you calls directly.
Photos. Real ones, added regularly. Interior, exterior, team, work in progress. Not stock.
Posts. A short update weekly. Small effect on ranking, useful effect on conversion.
Step 2: know where you actually rank
Before changing anything, run a grid rank check. It searches from many points across your area and shows where you appear at each one.
This matters because a single position number is meaningless in local search. You can be first from your own office and invisible two miles away. The grid shows you the shape of your visibility and gives you a baseline to judge changes against.
Step 3: fix the listing data
Your name, address and phone number need to agree wherever they appear. The detail, including which listings actually matter, is in NAP consistency: what actually matters.
Short version: fix the aggregators, the large platforms, and the two or three industry directories people in your trade genuinely use. Ignore packages promising three hundred citations.
Delete or merge duplicate listings. Duplicates do more damage than gaps.
Step 4: reviews
Review count and recency both feed prominence, and reviews decide which of the three businesses in the map pack gets the call.
Look at the top three for your term, note their counts, and treat that as your target. Ask at the moment the customer is most pleased, which is almost never two weeks later by email.
The full process, including what gets you penalised, is in how to get more Google reviews.
Step 5: the website
Now the site matters.
One page per service. Real content, written for someone deciding, not three paragraphs of filler around a keyword.
One page per genuine location. If you have three branches, three pages, each genuinely different: the team, the parking, the area served, the opening hours, photos of that building.
Do not build a page for every town within fifty miles. Templated city pages with the name swapped in get filtered out and they drag down the quality signal for the rest of your site.
LocalBusiness schema, matching your profile exactly.
Embedded map, address and phone in the footer, in plain text rather than inside an image.
Step 6: local links
Ordinary link building applies, but local businesses have sources a national brand does not:
- Suppliers and manufacturers who list stockists
- Local sponsorships: a team, an event, a school
- Chambers of commerce and trade associations
- Local news, when you have something genuinely newsworthy
- Local business directories with actual traffic
A handful of these is enough for most local markets. This is not a channel where you need hundreds.
What to expect and when
| Work | Typical effect |
|---|---|
| Category and profile fixes | 2 to 6 weeks |
| Citation cleanup | 4 to 8 weeks, mostly removing drag |
| Reviews | Gradual, compounding |
| Service and location pages | 2 to 4 months |
| Local links | 2 to 4 months |
Change one thing at a time and wait two weeks before judging. Local rankings are noisy and reacting weekly means changing three things at once and learning nothing.
The thing that will not change
Distance is a hard factor. If you are six miles from where people search, no amount of profile work puts you in that map pack.
The honest response is to target the area where you can win in the map, and go after the further-away city organically with a real service page. That still brings calls.
We run this whole sequence as local SEO, and the short version of what we would do for a service business is on SEO for local businesses.