Local SEO
Show up when someone nearby needs you now
A local search is two result sets on one screen. The map pack at the top is driven mostly by your Google Business Profile, your reviews and where the searcher is standing. The ordinary organic list underneath it is driven by your website. Winning locally means working on both, and knowing which one you are actually paying for.
- Two surfaces
- Map pack + local organic
- Our patch
- Seattle, Puget Sound, Portland
- Reporting
- Visibility by location, not one rank
- Starting at
- $420 per month
The problem
You rank for your own name and nothing else
The familiar pattern: search your company name and you are first. Search the service plus the city — the thing a stranger actually types — and you are below three competitors and a directory. The website is fine. The local signals are not.
Google’s published guidance on local results currently describes three inputs: relevance, distance and prominence. Distance you cannot change. Relevance and prominence come from how your Business Profile is categorised, what your reviews say, whether your business details agree with themselves across the web, and whether any page on your site genuinely serves a local query. That is the work, and most of it is not a keyword.
What this looks like
- You appear for your brand name and disappear for the service plus the city
- Competitors in the map pack are smaller than you and further away
- Your address or phone number is wrong on directories nobody on your team has logged into
- One page lists eleven cities you serve and ranks for none of them
- Reviews arrive occasionally, by accident, and nobody replies to them
- You have several locations sharing a single contact page
What is included
The four things local visibility actually rests on
Profile work is one of the four. If someone sells you local SEO and only ever touches the profile, you are buying a quarter of the job — and paying retainer rates for it.
Your Business Profile
The first fix- Primary and secondary categories chosen against what actually ranks in your area
- Services, attributes and the business description completed in full
- Service areas set to what you genuinely cover, not to the whole state
- Hours, holiday hours and contact details verified against reality
- Duplicate and unclaimed listings found and resolved
Citations and consistency
Off-site- An audit of where you are already listed, including places you never submitted to
- Name, address and phone made identical across every listing we can control
- Industry and Puget Sound directories people actually use, not a bulk blast to five hundred
- Apple Business Connect and Bing Places claimed alongside Google
- A record of every listing and login, handed over to you
On-site local signals
Your website- Location and service-area pages written to be genuinely different from one another
- LocalBusiness structured data that matches the profile exactly, field for field
- Full address, embedded map and a tap-to-call number that works on a phone
- Internal links from each service page to the location pages that matter
- Copy naming real neighbourhoods, real projects and real clients instead of a city list
Reviews and local authority
The slow part- A review request built into how your team already finishes a job
- Response guidance for your team, including for the critical ones
- Review language mined for the words customers use, fed back into page copy
- Local links earned through suppliers, sponsorships, trade bodies and press — never bought
- Competitor map-pack analysis repeated quarterly, because the local field moves
The boundary
Where local SEO ends and profile management begins
We sell these as two services because they are two jobs with different rhythms and different prices. Here is the line, stated the same way on both pages.
Local SEO is the strategy and the website
Choosing which services and which cities to compete for, building location pages that deserve to rank, getting structured data to agree with your listings, earning local links and designing the review programme. It is project work with an ongoing content and link component, and most of it happens on your own site.
Profile management is the operations
Running the Google Business Profile week to week: posts, photos, products and services, Q&A, review replies, hours and holiday hours, and watching for the edits Google and the public can make to your listing without asking. It is a recurring operational service and almost none of it touches your website.
They overlap in exactly one place
Profile setup — categories, services, description, service areas and the eligibility question — is the first fix in any local SEO engagement, because nothing above it works until it is right. Keeping the profile alive after that is profile management. If you buy both, the setup is scoped once and charged once.
Which one you need first
If the listing is incomplete, duplicated, suspended or simply unmanaged, start with profile management: it is cheaper and it is the constraint. If the profile is in reasonable shape and you are still losing the map pack to nearer, smaller competitors, the gap is prominence and site relevance — which is this service.
For reference
Which lever moves which result
Two different result sets share one page and they do not respond to the same work. This reflects how local search behaves now; Google changes the mix, and when it does we will tell you.
| Where you want to appear | What moves it | What will not move it |
|---|---|---|
| The map pack, at the top | Business Profile completeness and categories, review volume and recency, proximity to the searcher, and prominence across the rest of the web | Adding keywords to your homepage title tag. The map pack is not ranked on your site’s on-page copy |
| Local organic results, under the map | Pages that genuinely serve the query, internal linking, site speed, and local links pointing at those pages | Posting to your Business Profile. Profile activity does not rank your website |
| Google Maps searches and directions | A correct address and pin, accurate service areas, categories, photos and hours | Blog content. Nobody reaches an article from a directions request |
| “Near me” searches on a phone | Proximity and prominence, plus a mobile page that loads fast and offers a tap-to-call number | Putting the phrase “near me” into page copy. That is a signal from the device, not a keyword to match |
| A suburb you serve but are not based in | A genuinely substantial page about the work you do there, plus reviews and links that reference it | A templated city page with the name swapped — the pattern Google’s doorway-page guidance describes |
Our process
How a local programme gets off the ground
Understand needs
Measure where you actually appear
A local ranking depends on where the searcher is, so a single rank number is close to meaningless. We measure across a grid of points around your service area and record what the map pack returns from each one, alongside a profile and citation audit.
You getGrid baseline, profile audit and citation inventory
Strategize
Pick the queries and the geography
Which services, which cities, in what order. Covering eight suburbs badly loses to covering two properly — and sometimes the honest answer is that the competitor nearest the city centre owns the one you want.
You getA prioritised target query and location plan
Create & build
Profile, then citations, then pages
In that order, because profile and citation errors cap everything above them. Then the site work: location pages, structured data, internal links, and a review request process your team will actually use.
You getCorrected listings, published pages, review process live
Optimize & grow
Re-measure the grid, keep earning
The same grid, monthly, so you see visibility change by geography rather than as one number that hides the detail. Reviews, local links and content continue, because prominence is cumulative and slow.
You getMonthly grid report with calls and direction requests
Honest scoping
Who local SEO genuinely helps
A good fit if
- Customers come from a defined geography and search before they call
- You serve customers at your premises or travel to theirs — both qualify
- You can get reviews, or will build the habit of asking
- There is a real business at a real address with people who answer the phone
- Competitors occupy the map pack and you are not one of them
Not the right fit if
- You sell nationally or online and location is irrelevant to the buyer — ordinary SEO is the service you want
- There is no address and no genuine service area; Google’s guidelines require one or the other
- You want pages for thirty cities you do not operate in. That is a doorway pattern and it gets demoted
- The listing is suspended, or the address is a shared mailbox — the eligibility question comes first
- You need enquiries this week. Local visibility compounds over months; paid search is the lever for this week
One more thing. If the only thing wrong is the Business Profile, we will scope profile management on its own instead. It is the cheaper service and it is sometimes the entire answer.
Questions
Before you ask us
The things people ask about Local SEO before they get in touch. If yours is not here, ask directly — you will get a straight answer rather than a brochure.
Ask a questionHow long does local SEO take?
Profile and citation corrections can change map-pack visibility within weeks, because you are removing errors rather than building authority. The rest — reviews, local links, location pages that deserve to rank — compounds over months. Anyone quoting you a date for a specific map-pack position is guessing, since the result varies with where the searcher is standing.
What is the difference between this and managing my Google Business Profile?
Local SEO is the strategy plus the website work: which cities and services to compete for, location pages, structured data, citations, local links and the review programme. Profile management is the week-to-week operation of the listing itself — posts, photos, Q&A, review replies, hours. Profile setup is the single place they overlap, and it is scoped once if you buy both. The boundary section above sets out the line task by task.
Do I need a page for every city I serve?
No, and you probably should not have one. Thin city pages built from a template are the doorway pattern Google’s own guidance describes, and they tend to be ignored or demoted. We build a small number of genuinely different location pages — real projects, real neighbourhoods, real detail — and carry the rest of the local signal through the profile, citations and service pages. Our own site has eight location pages, deliberately.
Can you rank me in a city I have no address in?
In the ordinary organic results, yes, with a page that earns it. In the map pack it is much harder, because proximity is an input you cannot change. Renting a mailbox to manufacture an address breaches Google’s guidelines and risks a suspension that costs more than the ranking was worth, so we will not do it.
How do I get more reviews without annoying customers?
Ask once, at the moment the customer is most satisfied, with a link that takes two taps. The failure is almost never the wording — it is that nobody owns the asking. We build the request into a step you already have and set up replies so the profile reads as a conversation rather than a wall of unanswered stars. We will not buy or write reviews, and you should leave any agency that offers to.
What does local SEO cost?
It starts at $420 per month a month, depending on how many locations and services you are competing for and the state of your citations. One-off audit and cleanup work is quoted separately. If the honest answer is that you only need the profile run properly, that is a smaller number and we will say so.
Find out where you actually rank
Send us your business name and the services you want to be found for. We will run a grid of local searches around your area and send you what the map pack returns from each point — including which competitors keep appearing.