Local SEO advice has an unusual amount of folklore in it. Having run this across service businesses, clinics and multi-site hospitality, a fairly short list does most of the work.
The three factors that dominate
Google is unusually open about local ranking: relevance, distance and prominence. You cannot change distance. That leaves relevance and prominence, and most businesses under-invest in both.
Relevance — be specific about what you do
Your Google Business Profile category matters more than almost anything else you control. Pick the most specific primary category available, then add secondary categories that genuinely apply. Businesses routinely choose something broad and lose to a competitor whose category matches the search exactly.
List individual services rather than a general description. Each service you add is a term you become eligible for.
Prominence — reviews, consistently
Review volume, recency and rating all feed prominence. The pattern that works is a steady flow: four to eight new reviews a month, sustained, beats forty reviews acquired in one burst two years ago.
The way to achieve this is automation. A review request triggered on job completion, sent by text, with a direct link. Asking manually produces bursts and then silence.
Respond to all of them — positive and negative. Response rate is a signal, and unanswered negative reviews measurably suppress conversion regardless of ranking.
Location pages, done properly
If you serve multiple areas, each needs its own page. The mistake is generating twenty near-identical pages with the town name swapped, which Google handles by ignoring nearly all of them.
A location page earns its place when it contains something genuinely specific: local projects, area-specific service considerations, actual photographs from that area, local contact details.
Fifteen thin location pages will underperform three substantial ones. Build the ones you can genuinely differentiate.
Citations — necessary, not magic
Consistent name, address and phone details across major directories still matter, mainly as a hygiene factor. What doesn't work is buying packages of hundreds of low-quality citations. Get the major platforms and your industry directories right, then stop.
What we've stopped bothering with
- Keyword-stuffed business names — against policy and increasingly penalised
- Bulk citation packages — no measurable effect beyond the majors
- Posting daily to Google Business Profile — weekly is sufficient
- Chasing every new profile feature the week it launches
The honest timeline
Three to six months to move meaningfully in a competitive service area. The businesses that get there faster are almost always the ones that fixed review velocity first.