What Is Local SEO?

Local SEO is the work of getting found by people near you who are ready to hire someone. It covers your Google Business Profile, the map results, the reviews attached to your name, and the pages on your site that say what you do and where you do it. For most owner-operators it is the only SEO that pays.

Key takeaways

• Local SEO targets the map pack and nearby intent, not national rankings.
• Your Google Business Profile does more of this work than your website does.
• Reviews are not decoration. Purchase likelihood is roughly 270% higher at five reviews than at none.^{[1]Spiegel Research Center, Northwestern Medill, How Online Reviews Influence Sales}
• In a study of Seattle restaurants, a one-star Yelp increase tracked 5 to 9 percent more revenue, and the effect landed on independents rather than chains.^{[2]Michael Luca, Harvard Business School, Reviews, Reputation, and Revenue: The Case of Yelp.com}
• The highest-value tasks are free. They cost attention, not money.

How it works

Someone within a few miles of you types a need into their phone. Google decides which handful of businesses to show on the map, then which pages to list underneath. Local SEO is the work of being one of them.

Three things drive it. Relevance is whether your profile and site say you do the thing being searched for, in the words people use. Proximity is how close you are to the searcher, which you cannot change and should stop fighting. Prominence is everything that suggests you are a real, active, well-regarded business: reviews, mentions, consistent listings, a site that works.

Most owner-operators lose on relevance, not proximity. The primary category on the profile is wrong, or the services list is empty, or the site never names the towns served.

An example

A plumber ranks for "plumber" and wonders why the phone is quiet. The searches that convert are "water heater replacement," "burst pipe," "sump pump." Those are services, and each one needs to appear on the profile and be named on a page. Adding them is an afternoon of work and usually does more than a year of paying someone for reports.

The thing people get wrong

They buy a retainer to do work they could do better themselves in a week.

Claiming and verifying the profile, fixing the primary category, listing real services, and asking satisfied customers for reviews are the highest-value tasks in local SEO, and an owner does them more credibly than an agency. A retainer earns its keep on what comes after: pages that rank, technical problems, and keeping it going when you are busy.

The second mistake is treating reviews as a scoreboard. They are an input. Asking every happy customer, every time, moves more than anything a vendor can sell you.

Bottom line

Local SEO is narrow, learnable, and unusually fair to small operators. Do the free work first. If it is working and you do not have time to keep it going, that is the honest moment to hire someone. Not before.

Article Sources

1. Spiegel Research Center, Northwestern Medill, How Online Reviews Influence Sales↩
2. Michael Luca, Harvard Business School, Reviews, Reputation, and Revenue: The Case of Yelp.com↩