LOCAL SEO · GOOGLE MAPS & LOCAL VISIBILITY
Local SEO Services — Get Found on Google Maps and in Local AI Search
Google Business Profile · Map Pack · Local Pages · Citations
Most local searches are decided in seconds. Someone types “emergency plumber near me”, looks at the three businesses on the map, taps one and rings it. Local SEO is the work that puts you among those three.
It is a different job from ranking a blog post. Google builds local results mostly from signals outside your website — your Google Business Profile, your categories, your reviews, the way your details appear across the web — plus pages that genuinely talk about the places you serve.
People ask assistants now too. “Who does boiler repair near me?” gets answered by ChatGPT or an AI overview, drawing on your profile, your site and what other sites say about you. The businesses that get named are the ones with a consistent, well reviewed presence.
I work on all of it, and I check rankings from the places your customers search from rather than from your own office.
GET YOUR FREE LOCAL SEO AUDIT
Google Business Profile health
Map pack visibility by area
Local landing page coverage
Citation and NAP consistency
Reviews and response rate
Send me your website and I will tell you plainly what is holding your local visibility back. No obligation.
5+
YEARS EXPERIENCE
350+
PROJECTS COMPLETED
340+
HAPPY CLIENTS
98%+
CLIENT SATISFACTION
THE BASICS
What local SEO actually is
Local SEO decides whether your business appears when somebody nearby searches for what you sell — the map, the three results above the links, “near me” searches, and the answer an assistant gives when asked for a recommendation.
Google has said publicly that it weighs three things: proximity, relevance and prominence.
I add a fourth, consistency, because it is the one most businesses get wrong. The same details everywhere. It sounds trivial, and it is the most common reason a profile quietly underperforms.
Proximity
How close you are to the searcher. Move a mile and the map changes. You cannot influence it, and inventing an address gets profiles suspended. Because proximity is fixed, the other three have to carry the work.
Relevance
How closely you match what was searched for: categories, listed services, the words on your site, and whether a real page exists for each service and area. If you never say you do something, Google cannot match you to it.
Prominence
How well known you look — reviews, mentions, links, directories, local press, and the strength of your site. This is the slow part, and the part a competitor finds hardest to copy quickly.
Consistency
Your name, address and phone written identically everywhere. Every mismatch is a small doubt about whether those listings are the same business. Enough doubts and the profile is trusted less than it should be.
WHAT I DO
Local SEO services
Local SEO splits into three jobs: your Google Business Profile, your website, and how your business appears elsewhere on the web. Most businesses do a little of the first and none of the rest. The audit decides which of these are worth paying for.
Local SEO Audit
You find out where your local visibility is leaking.
I go through the profile, the site, the citations and the competitors in one pass, then order the problems by what will move first. It comes from your own data, not from guesswork.
- Business Profile review
- Map pack rank check by area
- Local page inventory
- Citation and NAP audit
- Prioritised fix list
Google Business Profile Optimisation
Your profile stops being a placeholder and starts doing a job.
The profile is what people see in the map pack, so it gets treated like a landing page rather than a form to fill in — and then kept current.
- Primary and secondary categories
- Full services and products list
- Description written for people and search
- Photos, logo and cover
- Hours, attributes and booking links
Local Keyword & Service-Area Mapping
You know which term belongs on which page, and which area belongs to which page.
Local keyword research has two axes: what people call the service, and where they want it done. I build the grid, then decide which combinations deserve a page.
- Service and location keyword grid
- Volume and intent grouping
- “Near me” and unbranded terms
- Competitor gaps by area
- Page-to-keyword mapping
Service Page Optimisation
Each service you sell gets one page that clearly sells it.
Most local sites bundle five services onto one page, then wonder why none of them rank. I separate them and write each around what a customer wants to know before ringing.
- One page per core service
- Titles and headings rewritten
- Copy covering scope, process and cost
- Internal links to related pages
- Clear calls to action
City & Location Page SEO
You rank in the towns you serve, not only the one you sit in.
Location pages work when they say something specific about that area, and fail when they are the same page with the name swapped. I build only the ones that can be genuinely different.
- A page per genuine service area
- Local detail and coverage information
- Area-specific proof where it exists
- Correct internal linking
- Honest advice on which areas to skip
Local Schema & Structured Data
Search engines and AI assistants read your details without guessing.
LocalBusiness markup states your name, address, phone, hours, areas served and services in a form machines parse directly. It removes ambiguity, and ambiguity is what stops you being quoted.
- LocalBusiness and Organization markup
- Address, hours and geo data
- Service and area-served markup
- FAQ and breadcrumb markup
- Validation and error clearing
Citation Building & NAP Consistency
Your business details say the same thing everywhere on the web.
Citations are your listings on directories and data aggregators. Consistency matters far more than volume. I find the mismatches, claim or correct what exists, and add the ones used in your sector.
- Citation audit and duplicate finding
- Core directory claims and corrections
- Industry and local listings
- Duplicates removed or merged
- A consistency record you keep
Review Strategy & Reputation Signals
You get more reviews from real customers, without breaking Google’s rules.
Reviews affect where you rank and whether anyone clicks. A simple repeatable request and a reply to everything works. Buying reviews or filtering out unhappy customers can cost you the profile.
- A request process that fits your workflow
- Wording for asking at the right moment
- Responses for good and bad reviews
- Monitoring across the main platforms
- What Google’s policies allow
Multi-Location & Franchise SEO
Every branch earns its own visibility instead of competing with the others.
Several locations bring duplicate profiles, pages competing with each other and details that drifted apart branch by branch. I set a structure where each location stands on its own.
- A separate profile per location
- Location page structure and URLs
- Duplicate and overlap resolution
- Consistent details across branches
- Reporting broken out by location
Local Content & Community Signals
Your site gives Google and AI assistants a reason to treat you as local.
Being part of an area leaves traces: the jobs you do there, the questions customers ask, the organisations you deal with. Content built from that is hard for a competitor to copy.
- Area-specific guides and FAQs
- Job and project write-ups by location
- Local partnerships and sponsorships
- Seasonal and regional demand
- Internal linking that ties it together
WHY IT FAILS
Why local SEO stops working
Local SEO rarely fails because of one large mistake. It fails because a handful of small things were set up once, never revisited, and went stale while the competition kept going. None of these is hard to fix.
The profile was filled in once and forgotten
Someone set it up when the business opened, ticked a category and never went back. Hours wrong at Christmas, services you no longer offer, no recent photos. Google favours profiles that show signs of life.
One page trying to rank for every city
A page listing twenty towns in the footer ranks properly for none of them. Twenty near-identical copies works no better. The answer is fewer, better pages for the areas that matter.
Categories chosen carelessly
The primary category shapes the map pack more than almost anything else on the profile. Businesses pick the broad, obvious one and lose to a competitor who picked the precise one.
Name, address and phone different in five places
An old unit number in one directory, a pre-rebrand name in another. Each inconsistency is small. Together they make it harder for Google to be confident the listings are the same business.
No reviews, or reviews nobody replies to
A profile with four reviews next to one with two hundred loses the click even when it ranks. Unanswered complaints are often the last thing somebody reads before deciding.
Rankings checked from the wrong location
Searching for yourself from your own office proves nothing — you rank there because you are standing there. Rankings have to be checked from the postcodes you want customers from.
WHO IT IS FOR
Who local SEO is for
Local SEO is worth doing when geography limits your customers: they come to you, or you travel to them. If your product ships nationally and location has nothing to do with the sale, spend the money elsewhere.
Home service businesses
Contractors and trades
Plumbers and electricians
Clinics and dental practices
Salons and spas
Restaurants and cafés
Law firms
Estate agents
Auto repair shops
Cleaning companies
Multi-location businesses
Agencies needing white-label local SEO
If your business is on that list, local search is probably the cheapest source of enquiries you have. If you tell me your customers come from everywhere, I will point you at technical or on-page work instead and say why.
MY APPROACH
How I work through a local SEO project
The order matters: measure first, fix what carries the most weight, then keep it running rather than declaring it finished.
01
Baseline local visibility
Before anything changes I record map pack positions from a grid across your service area, plus profile views, calls and direction requests. Without that, nothing later can be honestly attributed.
02
Audit the Business Profile
Line by line through categories, services, description, attributes, hours, photos and questions, plus any duplicate or unclaimed listings. Most of the quick wins live here.
03
Map service areas to pages
I lay out services against areas and decide which combinations deserve a page. This step is mostly about saying no, which is why it saves you money.
04
Fix the on-page layer
Titles, headings, copy, internal links, schema and speed on the pages that matter for local intent. The site decides whether anyone who lands there actually rings.
05
Build citations and consistency
Correct the mismatched listings, claim what is unclaimed, remove duplicates, and get the directories that matter saying the same thing. Then you get the record.
06
Set up a review process
A repeatable way of asking, a routine for replying, and monitoring so nothing sits unanswered. Simple enough that your team keeps doing it once I stop reminding them.
07
Track rankings by location
Ongoing reporting on positions across the area grid, profile actions, traffic to local pages and enquiries. We decide the next move from what it says.
WHY ME
Why work with me on this
You work with me directly
No account manager passing messages along. The person who audits your profile writes the pages and answers the phone.
Decisions come from your own data
Recommendations come out of your Search Console, your profile insights and rank checks from your areas — not from what generally works.
A prioritised plan, not a list of faults
Everything I find is ordered by what will move first and what it costs. You always know what is next and why.
You keep the deliverables
Audits, keyword grids, citation records, page briefs and tracking all live in your accounts, whether or not we carry on working together.
I tell you when something is not worth doing
Including when a location page should not exist, and when local SEO is not where your budget belongs. Saying no is part of the job.
Plain explanations
You will understand what I am doing and why. I do not use jargon to make the work sound harder than it is.
RESULTS
What good local SEO changes
This is what improves when the work is done properly. I will not put a percentage on any of it before I have seen your site, your profile and your competition — anyone who does is guessing.
- Better map pack visibility in the areas you serve
- More calls and direction requests from the profile
- Location pages that rank instead of sitting unvisited
- A profile that looks current and worth choosing
- Details that say the same thing everywhere on the web
- Fewer wasted enquiries from outside your area
- A steady flow of reviews rather than occasional bursts
- A reply on every review that the next customer can read
- Being named when someone asks an AI assistant locally
- Rankings you can check by postcode instead of guessing
- Each branch performing on its own merits
- A clear view of which areas bring work
How much each of these moves depends on your starting point: how competitive the area is, how close you sit to the searches you want, and what state the profile is in. Proximity puts a ceiling on some of it that no amount of work removes. After an audit I can tell you which outcomes are realistically available to you, and roughly in what order.
TOOLING
What I use on this work
Google Business Profile
Google Search Console
Google Analytics 4
Semrush
Ahrefs
Screaming Frog
Looker Studio
Microsoft Clarity
Google PageSpeed Insights
ChatGPT
FAQ
Local SEO questions, answered
It is the work that gets your business shown to people searching near you — the map pack, Google Maps, “near me” results, and the answer an AI assistant gives when somebody asks for a local provider. Part of it happens on your Google Business Profile, part on your website, and part on other sites that mention you. All three have to agree with each other.
Google has said publicly that it weighs proximity, relevance and prominence. Proximity is where the searcher is standing, and you cannot influence it. Relevance comes from your categories, your listed services and the words on your site. Prominence comes from reviews, mentions, links and the strength of your website. The last two are where the work goes.
It varies, and I will not pretend otherwise. Profile changes such as categories and services can show a difference within a few weeks. Citations, reviews and anything in a competitive area take months. Anyone giving you an exact date for a specific ranking is guessing. What I will do is show you the movement in the tracking as it happens.
You need a real address to verify the profile, but you can hide it if you travel to customers rather than them coming to you. That is the correct setting for a service area business. What you must not do is invent an address or use a virtual office you do not staff — that is one of the most common reasons profiles get suspended.
As many as you can make genuinely different, and no more. If you can write something real about the work you do in a town, that page earns its place. If the only difference would be the name, it will not rank and it can drag down the pages that would have. Usually that means fewer pages than people expect.
Less than they once did for ranking, but they still matter. Their job now is consistency — confirming your details are the same wherever they appear. They also matter for AI assistants, which pull business details from a range of sources. Consistency across a modest number beats hundreds of sloppy listings.
Ask every customer, not only the ones you expect to be pleased, and ask at the moment they are happiest. Make it one tap. Do not offer anything in exchange, do not screen people before asking, and never buy reviews. Then reply to all of them, including the awkward ones — that is the part future customers read.
Yes. Audits, Business Profile work, page briefs, citation work and reporting, all under your brand and in your format. I can stay entirely behind the scenes or join client calls as your local SEO specialist, whichever suits how you work.
RELATED SERVICES
On-Page SEO
The page-level work that decides whether your service and location pages can rank at all.
Technical SEO
Crawling, indexing, speed and structure. If your location pages are not indexed, local SEO has nothing to stand on.
SEO Consulting
Strategy, audits and a prioritised plan when you have people who can do the work but need it decided.
AI Search / AEO / GEO
Being named by ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI overviews — fast becoming the same question as being found on the map.
Get found by the people nearby who are already searching
Send me your website. I will look at your Business Profile and your local pages, check where you really rank from the areas you care about, and tell you plainly what is holding the visibility back. If local SEO is not what you need, I will say so. No obligation.