What Local SEO Actually Optimizes For
Local SEO is the practice of ranking in two distinct surfaces: the local pack (the map and three business listings that appear at the top of geographic queries) and the localized organic results that follow. The signals that drive these results overlap with broader SEO but tilt heavily toward proximity, relevance to the searcher's location, and the prominence of the business in its local context.
The strategic difference: in national SEO you're competing with every site in your industry. In local SEO you're competing with the businesses within driving distance of your customer. That's usually a much smaller, much more beatable competitive set — which is why local SEO is where modest budgets produce outsized returns.
Google Business Profile — The Foundation
Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is the single most important asset in local SEO. It powers your appearance in the local pack, in Google Maps, and in the knowledge panel that appears when someone searches your business name directly. A well-optimized profile can outperform a much stronger website on local queries.
The optimization checklist:
- Verify the listing and claim every relevant attribute and category. The primary category is the single highest-leverage field — choose it carefully.
- Fill every field completely. Hours, services, products, attributes, payment methods, accessibility features. Empty fields are missed opportunities.
- Add real photos regularly. Exterior, interior, products, team. Google weighs photo recency and quantity as engagement signals.
- Write a descriptive business description that includes your primary service and location naturally, without keyword stuffing.
- Post updates through the Google Posts feature regularly. Events, offers, announcements. These directly affect engagement metrics.
- Respond to every review — positive and negative — within a few days. Response rate is a signal; response quality affects perception.
NAP Consistency and Local Citations
Name, Address, Phone — NAP — is the foundational consistency check in local SEO. Your business name, exact street address, and phone number should appear identically across every directory, listing, and reference on the open web. Small inconsistencies — "Street" in one place, "St." in another, an old phone number lingering on an outdated listing — add ambiguity to Google's understanding of your business, and ambiguity costs you ranking confidence.
Local citations are the directory listings themselves: Yelp, Bing Places, Apple Maps, Yellow Pages, industry-specific directories, chamber of commerce listings, and the long tail of geo-specific directories. Quantity matters less than it used to; consistency matters more. Tools like BrightLocal, Moz Local, or Whitespark can audit citation consistency across hundreds of sources and surface the inconsistencies worth fixing.
