What is local SEO?

Short answer

Local SEO is the work of getting a business found by people searching in a specific place, mostly through the map pack and the Business Profile rather than the website alone. It runs on different rules from ordinary SEO. A well-run profile with a scruffy website regularly beats a beautiful website with nothing local behind it.

If you sell to customers in a defined area, whether that is one shop, a forty-mile service radius or ninety branches, local SEO is most of the SEO you need. It is also the part of SEO most often done badly, because it looks simple and consists of a lot of small things that all have to be right at once.

The short version

When someone searches “dentist near me”, “roof repair” or “criminal defense attorney”, Google shows a map with three businesses on it before the ordinary results. That block is the map pack, and for most local searches it takes the majority of the clicks and calls. Local SEO is mostly about getting into it, and then making sure the people who find you there choose you.

Google is unusually open about how it decides. Its own help page says local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, and adds that “there’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google”. Relevance is how well your profile matches the search. Distance is how far you are from the searcher. Prominence is how well known and well regarded the business is, online and off.

How it differs from ordinary SEO

In ordinary SEO, your website competes with other websites on the strength of its pages and links. In local SEO, the main asset is not the website at all. It is your Google Business Profile, and the competition is limited to businesses near the searcher.

That changes the economics. A plumber with a five-page site and a carefully built profile can outrank a competitor who has spent thousands on content, because the content was never what the map pack was measuring. I have written about this as ranking on the website and not in the map pack, because owners are often confused about why one does not lead to the other. They are two different competitions.

Distance also puts a hard cap on what any amount of work can achieve. You can widen the radius you rank in. You cannot rank across a whole city from one address, and anyone who promises it is selling something.

What local SEO work actually covers

The Business Profile. The primary category above all, then secondary categories, services, attributes, hours, photos and description. The single highest-leverage asset in local and usually the most neglected.
Local landing pages. Real pages for real locations or service areas, with content that genuinely differs. Not one template with forty town names swapped in.
Citations and consistency. Your name, address and phone number matching across the directories that matter. A finite job, not a monthly subscription.
Reviews. Volume, recency and responses. Also the best free source of copy you will ever get, because customers tell you why they chose you.

The website still matters. It is where a lot of people go after finding you on the map, and it is what Google reads to confirm what your profile claims. But it supports the profile rather than replacing it.

Why reviews matter more here than anywhere

Reviews do double duty in local search. They feed prominence, and they decide whether the person who found you actually calls. BrightLocal’s 2026 survey of 1,002 US adults found 97% read local reviews and 74% want to see reviews written in the last three months. A profile whose newest review is two years old reads as a business that may not be trading.

That is why I talk about review recency more than review count. A steady trickle beats a burst every spring followed by eight months of silence.

Who needs it

Any business that serves customers in a defined place: trades, clinics, law firms, restaurants, shops, agencies with an office clients visit. Also service-area businesses that travel to the customer, which have their own rules about how the profile is set up.

Who does not: businesses that sell nationally online with no local element. For them, the map pack is irrelevant and ordinary organic SEO is the work.

The common mistakes

The wrong primary category is the one I find most often, and it is also the quickest fix. Close behind it are a website and a profile that disagree about the business name, address or phone number, location pages that are the same page with a different town in the heading, and no process for asking customers for reviews.

None of those is glamorous. That is exactly why so many competitors never fix them, and why fixing them works.

How long it takes

Profile fixes can move visibility within weeks, sometimes before anything on the website has changed. Competing in a dense metro against established businesses with hundreds of reviews takes much longer, and proximity will always limit how far from your address you can rank. Plan on months for the full picture, and judge the early work by calls and direction requests rather than by a single ranking.

If you need customers in a specific place, my local SEO service covers the profile, the map pack, location pages and reviews, for one location or many. Tell me the area you need to be found in and I’ll tell you what’s standing in the way.