The local SEO checklist, step by step
Local SEO comes down to three things Google says it uses for local results: relevance, distance and prominence. You can’t move your address, so the work is making your business clearly relevant to the searches you want and clearly prominent in your area: a complete Google Business Profile, strong local pages, consistent listings, steady reviews, and local links and mentions.
- Google ranks local results mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, and you can’t pay for a better local ranking.
- Your Google Business Profile and your website’s service and location pages carry most of the relevance work.
- Prominence comes from reviews, links and mentions across the web, the same signals Ai engines lean on.
- Consistency matters: your name, address, phone and hours should match everywhere.
How local rankings work
Google’s own help page, How to improve your local ranking on Google, explains that local results are mainly based on three factors. Relevance is how well your profile matches what someone searched. Distance is how far you are from the searcher or the location in their search. Prominence is how well known your business is, which Google says draws on information from across the web, including links and reviews.
The same page states that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. That is useful when you are judging vendors: anyone selling a guaranteed map-pack spot is selling something Google says doesn’t exist.
1. Google Business Profile
- Verify the profile and make sure only people who should manage it have access.
- Pick the most specific primary category that describes your core service, then add secondary categories for other main services.
- Fill in everything: services, service areas or address, hours (including holiday hours), phone, website link, attributes and a plain description of what you do and where.
- Add real photos of your team, vehicles, premises and finished work, and keep adding them.
- Reply to reviews, positive and negative, in a helpful, specific way.
Our Google Business Profile guide covers each of these in detail.
2. Service and location pages
- One page per core service. Open with a direct answer: what the service is, who it’s for, where you offer it and what it typically costs or how pricing works.
- Location or service-area pages where you have something specific to say: the towns you cover, response times, local permits or conditions, and work you have done there. Thin pages that only swap the town name are a risk.
- Clear contact details on every page, as text, not only in an image.
- Structured data for your business (LocalBusi