What local SEO actually is
When someone searches "dentist near me", Google produces two separate lists: a map with three businesses on top, and classic organic results below. Those lists rank by different rules, and most of the clicks go to the one on top.
Local SEO is the whole body of work required to be visible in both. In the map pack the business profile is decisive; in the organic list it is your site's content and technical health. Running them separately is a common mistake, because Google evaluates the same business entity in both and the signals feed each other.
How it differs from classic SEO
| Classic SEO | Local SEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Where you compete | One organic list | Map pack + organic list |
| Effect of location | Low | Decisive — the searcher's position changes the ranking |
| Main asset | The website | The business profile plus the website |
| Unit of measurement | One ranking number | A distribution of rankings across a grid |
| Conversion shape | Site visit | Call, directions, message — often without visiting the site |
That last row is what most businesses miss. A large share of local demand arrives as a direct call or a directions request without the site ever being opened. A business looking only at site analytics therefore systematically underestimates what local SEO returns.
NAP consistency and directories
NAP stands for name, address and phone. Every time Google sees the same business across different sources, it accumulates confidence that the business is real. Inconsistency between those sources — a different spelling here, an old phone number there — weakens that confidence.
The work is to find every source the business appears in and lock it to a single form: industry directories, map services, social profiles and any leftover records from an old website. For address-hidden businesses the address field stays empty, which makes it even more critical that the name and phone are byte-identical everywhere.
The role of the website
However strong the profile is, the top three gets hard in competitive cities when the site does not support it. Google folds the linked website into its relevance calculation: which services the site talks about, which place names appear, and whether the pages genuinely explain those services.
So the site side of the programme runs three tracks: technical SEO makes sure the site can be crawled and indexed, on-page SEO pins each page to a single search intent, and content production turns uncovered services and queries into pages.
Multi-city and multi-location setups
Local SEO for a single-location business is not the same job as for one with three branches. Branch setups need a separate profile per location, a separate review pool and a separate location page on the site. Those pages being copies of each other is the most common — and most expensive — mistake we see.
For businesses with no branches that nevertheless serve several cities, the situation is different: opening additional profiles is a policy violation. The right route is to build city-level visibility on the site — provided each city page carries real information about that city. Template pages with the city name swapped are treated as doorway pages and damage the site as a whole.
The bar for creating a city page: if you have nothing real to say about that city (local competitor analysis, a case from there, region-specific data), do not create the page. Ten good city pages beat fifty templates.
The 90-day programme
- Weeks 0–2 — Measure and diagnose. Baseline grid rankings, profile audit, competitor category and review gap, technical state of the site, NAP scan.
- Weeks 2–4 — Root fixes. Category and service structure, indexing blockers, missing structured data, directory inconsistencies. Most of the jump usually comes from this stage.
- Weeks 4–8 — Content and signal building. Missing service pages, the profile post calendar, switching on the review flow.
- Weeks 8–12 — Consolidation. Targeted fixes for the areas still weak on the grid, tightening internal links, reacting to competitor movement.
What we measure
We do not send a single ranking screenshot, because local rankings change with the searcher's location and a measurement from one point does not represent reality. Instead we report three sources together:
- Grid rankings — where you place across 49 points laid over the city, tracked over time
- Profile interactions — searches, direction requests, calls and messages
- Search Console — which queries you appear for, clicks and average position
Read together, these catch situations like "rankings improved but the phone isn't ringing" or "traffic grew but from the wrong city" early, so the programme can be corrected.