Local SEO

Local SEO is SEO for businesses that serve customers in a place: a clinic, a restaurant, a law office, a contractor who drives to the job. When someone searches for a service nearby, the results include a short list of local businesses, and most local SEO work goes into earning a place on that list and turning the view into a call, a booking or a visit.

How Google ranks local results

Google's Business Profile help describes three main factors:

• Relevance: how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for.
• Distance: how far each business is from the person searching.
• Prominence: how well known a business is, based partly on how many websites link to it and how many reviews it has.

Google also says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking, and that businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up in local results.

What the work involves

• A verified, complete Google Business Profile with the right categories, hours, services and photos.
• The same business name, address and phone number on your website and in directories.
• A page on your website for each service and area you cover, with schema markup for your business details.
• Asking real customers for reviews, and replying to them.

You can't move your office closer to every customer, so distance is mostly out of your hands. Relevance and prominence are where the work pays off.

How it relates to Worcia

Local SEO is part of SEO & GEO, Worcia's search and AI-answer optimization service. See the step-by-step local SEO guide for service businesses and the use case on showing up for "near me" searches.