Local visibility runs on different rules than ordinary SEO - and the website is not the main thing here, the business profile is. For a service company working one city, that is the best news available: the most effective part of the job is free, fits into a few hours and needs no developer.
The catch is that almost nobody does it properly. A profile set up five years ago, a category picked at random, opening hours out of date since the refit, four reviews and no replies - that is the standard I see at companies complaining that “the competition is above us”.
Below is how it actually works and the order in which to sort it out.
Two separate rankings, not one
Type “plumber near me” on a phone and you get two things that look like one list but are ranked separately:
- The map block (also called the local pack) - three businesses with pins, a rating and a “Call” button. It takes up almost the entire first screen on a phone. What ranks here are business profiles, not websites.
- The organic results - the classic list of blue links underneath. What ranks here are websites.
That distinction changes everything about how you plan the work. You can have a great site and not be in Maps. You can be first in Maps with a one-page website. On queries with local intent - “near me”, “open now”, “in [city]” - the map block takes the clear majority of the phone calls, because it comes first and has a call button that never requires visiting a site.
The practical conclusion: if you sell a service within a radius of a few dozen kilometres, the profile matters more than the website. The website is step two, not step one.
The profile: what Google actually weighs
Google describes local ranking in terms of three factors, and they are worth knowing because they show immediately what you can and cannot influence:
- Distance - how far you are from where somebody is searching. You have no influence over this and it is the strongest factor. That is why results differ between districts of the same city, and why checking “your position” from your own office tells you nothing.
- Relevance - how well your profile matches what somebody is looking for. This is driven mainly by category, name, description and the services list.
- Prominence - how well known the business is: the number and quality of reviews, mentions across the web, activity on the profile, the health of the website.
Two out of three are genuinely in your hands. Working on local visibility means working on relevance and prominence - leave distance alone.
Category - the most underrated decision
The primary category on your profile is the single setting with the biggest effect on which queries you appear in at all. Google treats it as a declaration of “what this business is”.
Three rules I apply:
- The primary category should be what you do most often, not what sounds broadest. “Electrician” beats “construction company” if 80% of the jobs are electrical installations.
- Add secondary categories sparingly - each one dilutes the signal. Three or four accurate ones work better than ten added just in case.
- Check the categories used by the top three businesses in your city on your main query. That is the fastest way to establish how Google classifies this service in practice.
After the category, the second most important item is the services list on the profile. It is a separate section where you enter the names of specific services with a short description. Most companies leave it empty, and it is free space for the phrases people actually search.
The business name: a temptation worth resisting
Putting “Plumber London 24h - emergencies” into the profile name instead of your real company name works. In the short term. Google’s guidelines require the real-world name - the one on the sign, the invoice and the register.
The problem is that reporting a profile like that takes a competitor three clicks, and the consequence is often suspension. Recovering a suspended profile means weeks of correspondence with support, during which you are not in Maps at all. Gaining a few positions is not worth that.
NAP - consistent details across the web
NAP stands for name, address and phone. The rule is simple: those three details should look identical everywhere they appear - on the profile, on the website, in trade directories, on Facebook, on Apple Maps.
Identical means character for character. “5 Flower Street” and “5 Flower St.” are two different versions as far as a system is concerned. Two phone numbers in two places is a signal that one of them is out of date.
In practice:
- Settle on one canonical version of the name, address and phone. Write it down in a file.
- Search Google for the company name and the phone number in quotes. You will see where the data already sits.
- Fix the mismatches, starting with the places that get the most traffic: Google, Facebook, the biggest directories in your niche.
It is two hours of boring work that keeps paying off in the background for years.
Reviews: volume, freshness and replies
Reviews on a profile do two jobs at once: they lift your position and they persuade the human who has already found you. The second job matters more, because that is what turns an impression into a phone call.
What works:
- Regularity beats volume. Thirty reviews from the last two years look better than a hundred collected in one month three years ago. A fresh review is a signal that the business is still trading.
- Asking for reviews has to be part of the process, not a one-off push. What works best is the moment right after a job is finished, while the customer is happy - a review link in a text message or in the wrap-up email.
- Reply to all of them, including the good ones. A reply is content Google can see, and proof to the reader that somebody is home.
- Answer a negative one calmly and specifically. One bad review with a factual reply does less damage than a flawless average that looks suspicious.
What not to do: buy reviews or post them from friends’ accounts. Google detects unnatural patterns, and the consequence is losing whole batches of reviews at once - including the genuine ones, if they happen to fall in the same period.
Photos, hours and posts - the activity signals
An abandoned profile looks, to Google, like a business that has stopped trading. Three things keep it alive and none takes more than fifteen minutes a month:
- Photos - real ones, taken on a phone, showing people, equipment and finished work. Everybody recognises stock photography and it convinces nobody. Add a few every month.
- Opening hours - current, including holidays. “Open now” queries filter on that field, and a customer who drives out to a locked door will leave the review you do not want.
- Posts - short entries on the profile about an offer, a new service, a completed job. They are short-lived, but they are an activity signal and they take up space in the profile preview.
What the website has to carry
The profile does not live in a vacuum - Google compares it against the site. Four things the site needs in order to support local visibility:
- NAP somewhere visible, ideally in the footer on every page, in the same form as on the profile. The address as text, not as an image.
- A dedicated contact page with the address, a map, hours and a phone number that is tappable on mobile.
- Pages for the cities you genuinely work in - but with real content. Twenty pages reading “Services in [city]” that differ by one word are template content that does not rank and can damage the whole domain. Three pages with real jobs, travel costs and local context do work.
- Speed on mobile. Local search is mobile by definition, often on the move and on a weak signal. A site that takes five seconds loses the call before it appears.
What a local service company’s website specifically needs to contain, and how to lay out the proof on it, I set out separately in the piece on a website for a local service business.
A business with no address to show
Plenty of service companies work at the customer’s premises and have no office anybody visits - or work from home and would rather not publish the address. Google covers this directly: you set up a service area profile instead of one with an address.
Three things to know:
- When setting up the profile you give an address for verification (a code goes there), but you can hide it - publicly, only the area you work in shows.
- You define the area by cities, districts or postcodes. Do not inflate it - “the whole region” weakens relevance in every individual city.
- A service area profile does not show a pin in Maps the same way a premises with an address does, but it still competes in the local pack.
What not to do
Four things that end badly in local visibility, and I have seen every one of them:
- Fake addresses - virtual offices and friends’ addresses in several cities at once. This is the most common reason for suspensions and the easiest thing for a competitor to report.
- Several profiles for one location, one per service. Duplicates compete with each other and drag both down.
- Swapping the phone number for a forwarding number from a call tracking system without leaving the real number on the website. The NAP mismatch is created on day one.
- Buying a “local SEO package” with no defined scope. Profile work and directory listings are countable work - there should be a list of what will be done. How to tell an honest offer from a smoke screen I wrote up in the piece on how to buy SEO without getting scammed.
What to measure
Your position in Maps is mobile by definition - it depends on where the searcher is standing - so chasing “third place” makes no sense. Measure what turns into phone calls:
- Profile statistics - impressions in search and in Maps, taps on the phone number, taps for directions, clicks through to the website. That data is in the profile panel, free.
- The queries people used to find the profile - same section. It shows how Google sees you and it often surprises.
- Search Console for the site - separately, for the organic side.
- Phone calls. The simplest and most honest counter: how many calls a month and where from, asked directly when you pick up.
Taps on the phone number from your profile is a metric worth noting monthly from day zero. Without a baseline you will not be able to judge in six months whether anything changed. How to read website position data, and how it differs from what you see in your own browser, I set out in the SEO audit checklist.
A plan for the first month
The order that gives the most effect for the least cost:
- Week 1 - claim or create the profile and verify it. Set the primary category, the secondary ones, the description, hours and service area. Fill in the services list.
- Week 2 - sort out NAP: one canonical version, corrections on the profile, on the website, on Facebook and in the three biggest directories in your trade.
- Week 3 - upload a dozen or so real photos. Start a review process: a ready-made text message with a link, sent after every completed job.
- Week 4 - fix the website: NAP in the footer, tappable phone number, a contact page with a map, mobile speed. Note the baseline from your profile statistics.
After that it is rhythm: a few photos and one post a month, replies to every review within a week, hours updated before holidays. Fifteen minutes a month.
FAQ
How long before local SEO shows results? Verifying the profile itself usually takes a few days. The first changes in impressions after sorting out the category and services show in the profile statistics in two to three weeks. A real increase in phone calls is a matter of two to three months, mainly because that is how long it takes to gather a sensible number of fresh reviews. That is still faster than ordinary SEO.
Do I need a website to be in Google Maps? No, the profile works without one, and you can point it at a Facebook page. But a website raises the credibility of the profile, gives you room for content that will not fit on the profile, and lets you rank in organic results too - the second of the two rankings. For a service business the minimum is a brochure website with contact details, an offer and finished work.
A competitor is above me in Maps despite worse reviews. Why? Usually because of distance - they are simply closer to where you are searching from. Check it by opening Maps and panning to a different district; the ranking will change. The second most common reason is a better-fitting primary category. Rating and review count are only one of the factors, and not the most important one.
Is it worth paying to be added to directories? Usually not in the form of a “200 directories package”. The value sits in the directories your customers actually search - trade bodies, local chambers, portals covering services in your niche. A dozen well-chosen places with correct NAP work better than two hundred automated entries nobody will ever visit.
Is local SEO enough, or do I still need advertising? It depends on how urgently you need work. Local visibility builds over months and then runs on its own; advertising delivers calls from tomorrow and stops with the budget. At the start it usually makes sense to do both, and the maths that helps you decide is in the piece on SEO or Google Ads.
Want your company to show up in Google and in ChatGPT answers? I work on technical SEO and AI visibility from the code side, not the reporting side. Tell me which questions matter to you and I will quote it.