Local SEO: The Complete Practical Guide
Everything that moves local rankings, ordered by impact.
Local SEO
Google Business Profile first
Your profile is the single highest-leverage local asset. Complete every field. Choose the primary category precisely, because it does more work than any other setting. Post weekly. Upload photos monthly. Answer questions. Respond to every review.
Then citation consistency
Your name, address, and phone must be identical everywhere. Not similar, identical. Inconsistency creates ambiguity and ambiguous businesses get filtered from the pack.
Fifty accurate citations on relevant directories outperform five hundred inconsistent ones.
Then reviews
Volume, recency, rating, and response rate all matter independently. Review velocity is the most neglected: a profile that stops receiving reviews slides even if its total is high.
Build a systematic request workflow triggered after service delivery. Never buy reviews.
Then local content
Genuinely unique pages per service area, not templated pages with the city name swapped. Reference actual local landmarks, neighbourhoods, projects, and conditions. Google detects templated location pages easily.
Key takeaways
- Primary category selection does more work than any other GBP field
- Fifty consistent citations beat five hundred inconsistent ones
- Review velocity matters as much as review count
- Templated location pages with swapped city names are detected
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