Local SEO Guide
Most local SEO advice is a list of thirty tactics with no priority attached. This is the sequence — what to fix first because it pays off in weeks, and what to start now because it takes months.
Rankings9 min read
Nearly every business we audit is already doing local SEO work. They're posting to social media, they bought a citation package, someone's writing blog posts. The problem isn't effort — it's that the effort is going into step six while step one is broken. You cannot out-content a Google Business Profile with the wrong primary category.
Local ranking comes down to three things Google weighs: relevance, distance, and prominence. Distance you can only influence indirectly. Relevance is fast to fix. Prominence is slow and compounding. So the correct order is: make yourself unmistakably relevant, then build prominence forever.
01
Primary category exact, every relevant secondary category added, services listed individually with descriptions, hours correct including holidays, photos uploaded monthly, products or menu populated, messaging on if you'll actually answer it. Most profiles we audit are 60% complete and the owner thinks they're done.
02
One canonical format across Google, Apple, Bing, Yelp, Facebook, the aggregators, and your own site footer. Kill duplicate listings. This is cheap, fast, and quietly blocking a lot of businesses.
03
Not a review push — an engine. A text sent the day the job closes, every job, forever. Velocity and recency matter more than raw count, and a reply on every review (especially the bad ones) is a visible trust signal to both Google and the person reading.
04
A single services page listing twelve offerings ranks for none of them. One page per service, written like a human explaining the work, with the local context that only applies here.
05
One page per town or neighborhood you genuinely serve — with specific detail, not a find-and-replace of the city name. Ten thin templated pages will hurt you; four substantial ones will not.
06
Chamber membership, sponsoring a youth league, a supplier's partner page, a quote in a local paper, hosting an event. Slow, unglamorous, and the hardest signal for a competitor to copy.
Your primary category is the single highest-leverage field in local SEO. "SEO company" and "marketing agency" are different queries with different competitors. Pick the one that matches what you want to be called for, then add the rest as secondary. Changing your primary category can move rankings within days — in both directions, so change it deliberately and note the date.
Then fill the fields nobody fills: the services list with individual descriptions, the business description with the terms you actually want to rank for, opening date, attributes, and the Q&A section, where you can post and answer your own questions. Photos matter too, and consistency beats a single bulk upload — a few new ones each month reads as an active business.
A business with 40 reviews and four new ones a month generally outperforms a business with 200 reviews where the last one was in 2023. Recency signals an operating business; a stalled review count signals the opposite. Build the ask into the job itself — an automated text the moment work is marked complete — rather than relying on someone remembering.
Reply to all of them. Reply to bad ones especially, calmly and factually, because prospects read that reply as evidence of how you'd handle their problem. And never buy reviews: filtering catches them, and the profile suspension costs far more than the reviews were worth.
The pattern that works is service × area. One page per service you sell, one page per area you serve, plus genuinely useful answers to the questions your customers ask before they buy. Write the way you'd explain it in person. Mention the things only a local would know — the permitting quirk, the seasonal swing, the neighborhood where every house has the same problem.
Skip the templated area page factory. Ten near-identical pages with the town name swapped is the fastest way to look thin and get ignored. Four pages with real substance will outperform them, and you can add more when you have something to say.
Profile and citation fixes can shift the map pack in two to six weeks. Review velocity shows up over a couple of months. Content and links compound across three to six months and keep paying after that. Anyone promising page one in thirty days is either misreading your market or planning something that risks a penalty.
If you'd rather see what this looks like priced out, we broke that down in how much local SEO costs. And if your NAP data is the thing holding you back, start with local SEO citations.
We'll run a free local audit — map pack position, competitor gaps, and the fixes that move the needle first. No contract, no pressure.
