Local SEO comes down to three unglamorous jobs. Keep your Google Business Profile complete and correct, write your name, address and phone number the same way everywhere they appear, and gather reviews steadily instead of in bursts. You can do all three yourself, without touching a line of code. Here is why each one matters, starting with the customer you never knew you lost.
I spend as much of the year as I can on the water and on the backroads, and the thing that still stings is finding out too late about something I would have happily driven hours for. A Pow Wow on Manitoulin Island I wanted to attend. A community craft festival in a town I had already driven through that morning. My partner could build an entire holiday out of touring chocolatiers. We have rolled into a town and only then discovered the shop she would have planned the whole day around, an hour after it closed.
Every one of those was public and open for business, with a poster in a window somewhere in town. The details just never reached the phone in my hand.
Now stand on the other side of the counter. If you ran that craft festival, or that chocolate shop I never found, I'm the customer you lost that day and you never knew I was there. I didn't weigh you up and choose somewhere else. I never got the chance to choose at all.
What local SEO actually means
Local SEO, short for search engine optimization, is the work of making sure that when somebody nearby searches for what you sell, Google is confident enough about who you are, where you are, and whether people like you to put you in front of them.
Google's own page on local ranking names three things it weighs. Relevance is how well your profile matches what was typed, distance is how far you are from the person searching, and prominence is how well known the business is. The same page says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up in local results, and that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.
Confidence is the operative word. Think of how you'd ask a neighbour about a plumber. If three people all say "call Dave, he's at the shop on Mill Street, here's the number," you call Dave. If you get three different numbers and one person says Dave moved, you quietly find somebody else. Google behaves the same way, faster and across a few hundred sources.
Your Google listing does more work than your website
The box beside the search results, or at the top of Google Maps, with your hours and photos and star rating, is your Google Business Profile. It's free and you claim it yourself. A person can read your hours, look at your photos and tap "Directions" without ever opening your website, so the details on that box carry more weight than they look.
| Field | What Google's own pages say | What to do this week |
|---|---|---|
| Main category | Pick categories that complete "this business IS a" rather than "this business HAS a", as specific as possible, as few as possible | Read the category on the three listings above yours; if they all say one thing and you say another, change yours |
| Hours | Confirm hours for official holidays even when they match your regular hours, so customers can see they're accurate | Set regular hours, then special hours for every holiday this season |
| Seasonal close | A business closed for more than seven days or for the off-season should use "Temporarily closed" | Mark it, then reopen it, on the actual dates |
| Photos | An exterior photo helps customers recognize your business when they visit; photos should be in focus, well lit, with no significant alterations or excessive filters | Front of the building from the road, the parking, the inside, your staff, taken on a phone |
| Posts | Updates, offers and events appear on Search and Maps; posts older than six months are archived unless they carry a date range | Post the event you're running next weekend, which is exactly the post that would have got me to that craft festival |
A campground that sets its main category to "Tourist attraction" is telling Google it has a campground rather than that it is one. It will lose to the campground down the road that said "Campground." Pick the most specific category that honestly describes what you mainly do, then add the others underneath.
On photos, a phone picture of your actual front door meets Google's bar; a stock image of somebody else's shop helps nobody recognize yours from the road. On posts, Google doesn't say how often, and I wouldn't set a schedule you'll abandon by March. One post whenever something real changes is enough.
Say your name, address and phone number the same way everywhere
In the trade this gets called NAP consistency, which stands for name, address, phone. The idea underneath the acronym is simple: every place on the internet that lists your business should list it identically.
Identically is stricter than it sounds. "Unit 4" on one listing and "#4" on another. An old phone number on a directory you forgot you signed up for in 2014. "Ltd." in one place and nothing in another.
Each of those looks harmless on its own. Stacked up, they're the three different phone numbers for Dave. Google's guidelines for the profile set the standard: the name as it appears on your storefront, website and stationery, a precise address, and a phone number that connects to your location rather than a call centre. Hold every other listing to the same three rules.
Write your official version down once. Name, address and phone, exactly as you want them, in a file you can find again. Then correct the listings you can get into: your Google Business Profile, Apple Business Connect (where you claim your location on Apple Maps), Bing Places, Facebook, and your own website footer. Those five cover the places a customer with a phone is likely to open.
Reviews: recency matters as much as the count
Two businesses both have forty reviews. One got its last review yesterday. The other got its last one in 2023. To a customer scanning quickly, the second one reads as maybe-closed, or at least as coasting. A four-year-old review is the milk at the back of the fridge. It isn't lying to you, it just isn't evidence about today.
A four-year-old review is the milk at the back of the fridge.
So the goal is a steady trickle that never quite stops, which is a much easier target than a big number sitting still. Google's local ranking page says more reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking, and that positive reviews and helpful replies can help your business stand out. Getting them honestly is about removing friction and asking at the right moment.
- Ask in person, at the moment the customer is visibly happy, and only then. That's the ask with the highest yield and the least ick.
- Follow up with a direct link. Google's page on getting reviews says you can ask customers to visit a Google link or scan a QR code. Put the link in your invoice email, your receipt, your booking confirmation.
- Ask everyone, not only the people you're sure will rave. Google's Maps content policy says you may not discourage negative reviews or selectively solicit positive ones.
- Offer nothing in exchange. The same policy prohibits incentives such as payment, discounts, free goods or services for posting a review or removing a negative one.
- Reply to all of them, including the rough ones. Google posts an approved reply publicly under the review, so a calm, specific answer to a two-star review is read by every future customer who scrolls past it.
If you're in a regulated field like family law, check your professional body's rules on testimonials before you build any review-request process.
Directories: the short list, then stop
Citation building, which just means getting your business details listed on other people's sites, is an industry that would happily sell you two hundred listings. The ones that matter are the handful real people open on a phone.
Worth your time: the five above, your local chamber of commerce, and the one or two directories that dominate your industry. Campgrounds have theirs, and so do law practices. You already know which ones your customers name.
Skip the rest. Mass-submission services and anything charging a monthly fee to keep a listing "verified" are money spent on listings nobody reads.
The website side, kept simple
Your own site supports all of this without much effort. Put your full address and phone number in the footer of every page, as real text rather than inside an image. Put your town or region in the title of your homepage and your main service pages, so the browser tab reads something like "Garden centre in Fonthill." If you serve several towns, give each one a real page about serving that town, not fifteen near-identical pages with the place name swapped.
That covers what your own site contributes here. The deeper technical work is in the technical SEO guide, and it matters less than the profile and the reviews. Why a well-ranked site can still produce no calls is the subject of the website conversion guide.
If you only do one thing this week
- Open your Google Business Profile and read the main category. Compare it with the three listings above yours.
- Check the hours, including the next holiday, and mark a seasonal close if you have one coming.
- Read the phone number on the profile and dial it.
- Copy the name, address and phone from the profile and check them against your website footer and your Facebook page.
- Ask the next customer who thanks you in person for a review.
The first four need nothing but your phone. A wrong category or a closed sign on a day you're open is felt by the customer immediately, and no amount of work anywhere else makes up for it. Everything else in this guide is an improvement on a foundation. Those five are the foundation.
Common questions
We close for the winter. Should I just delete the hours? Leave the hours alone and use Google's closed status. Its page on marking a business closed says a business closed for more than seven days or for the off-season should use "Temporarily closed", which shows on Maps and Search as exactly that. You reopen it from the same place in spring. For a closure of up to six days in a row, set special hours and your regular hours stay put.
Do my customers need a Google account to leave a review? Yes. Google's page on getting reviews says customers must be signed in to a Google Account, and that they can set one up with a non-Gmail email address. Worth knowing before you ask a customer who says they "don't do Google."
Checked against Google's Business Profile help pages on 2026-09-21: How to improve your local ranking on Google, Guidelines for representing your business on Google, Tips to get more reviews, Read and reply to reviews, Maps user-generated content policy, How to set special hours, Mark your business as closed, Photo and video guidelines, Create and manage posts. The Apple Business Connect description is from Apple Business, read the same day.
If you'd rather have somebody handle the whole thing, that's the work I do. But you can get a long way on your own first, and I'd start there.