Local SEO: Your Website Is the Smallest Part of It
Most businesses treat local SEO as ordinary SEO with a town name added to the title tag. It runs on different signals, and the one carrying the most weight is not the website.
Local SEO: Your Website Is the Smallest Part of It
Most businesses that ask us about local SEO have already done the thing they believe local SEO is. They put the town name in the homepage title. Sometimes twice.
Then nothing happens, and the conclusion is that SEO doesn't work for a business like theirs.
What is local SEO?
Local SEO is the work of getting your business to appear when someone nearby searches for what you sell. It runs on a different set of signals from ordinary search. Google weighs how well your business matches the search, how far you are from the person searching, and how well known you are. Your business profile carries more of that weight than your website does.
Why does local search work differently?
Search for something with no place attached and Google gives you a list of pages. Search for something it reads as local and you get a map with a handful of businesses pinned to it, and the pages arrive underneath. That block has a name, the local pack, and it is assembled from a different set of inputs.
Google is unusually open about what those inputs are. Its own guidance names three. Relevance is how well your business matches what was typed. Distance is how far you sit from the searcher. Prominence is how well known you are, built from your reviews and from what the rest of the web says about you.
Notice that your homepage is not on that list. It feeds into the third one, quietly, at some remove.
What actually ranks in the map pack?
Every year, Whitespark asks a panel of local search practitioners to score 187 ranking factors. The resulting list is the closest thing the field has to a public answer. Here is the top ten for the map pack, in their order:
# | Factor | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
1 | Primary Google Business Profile category | Your profile |
2 | How far you are from the person searching | Geography |
3 | Keywords in the business name on the profile | Your profile |
4 | Having a physical address in the city being searched | Geography |
5 | Being open at the moment of the search | Your profile |
6 | A high star rating | Your reviews |
7 | Showing an address instead of hiding it behind a service area | Your profile |
8 | Additional categories | Your profile |
9 | Number of Google reviews carrying written text | Your reviews |
10 | The map pin sitting in the right place | Your profile |
Six of those are your business profile. Two are your reviews. Two are geography. None of them is your website, and the first factor on the list that lives on your site sits at number seventeen.
The ranking factor you cannot optimise
Distance is a ranking factor. You cannot rank in a town you are not in.
This is worth sitting with, because it quietly invalidates a lot of what agencies show clients. Search from one side of a city and search from the other and the local pack changes. So the screenshot proving a business ranks first is only ever true from wherever the person taking the screenshot was standing. Number one from where?
What it means in practice is less comfortable. If your customers are twenty minutes away, you are competing against a business two minutes away and losing points on something no amount of content will fix. Your options are to be considerably more relevant and more prominent than the closer competitor, or to have a genuine presence nearer your customers.
There is a third option that people take and shouldn't, which is inventing an address. Google's rules on representing your business are explicit about this, and it suspends profiles for it. Getting reinstated is slow, and while you wait you are not in the map at all.
Why your category matters more than your homepage
Businesses pick a primary category in about four seconds and never look at it again. A place serving seafood registers as "Restaurant". A physiotherapist registers as "Doctor". A firm doing kitchen fitting registers as "Contractor".
Each of those is technically true and strategically expensive, because the category is how Google decides which searches you are even eligible for. Too broad and you compete with everyone. Wrong and you compete for the wrong thing.
Have a look at what the businesses ranking above you are using. Google lets you change yours at any time, and it shows the primary category publicly on every profile. It is the least secret competitive intelligence available and almost nobody checks it.
Reviews are a ranking input, not just a reputation one
The instinct is to treat reviews as something to worry about when a bad one arrives. Two of the top ten factors above are reviews, and two more sit just outside it.
What counts is not only the star average. Volume matters. Recency matters more than people expect, so a profile carrying plenty of reviews that all stopped arriving two summers ago reads as a business that may have closed. Replying matters, and replying to the good ones matters too.
Asking customers for reviews is allowed and encouraged. Google's content policy names the versions that are not, and selectively asking only the customers who look pleased is one of them. Paying for reviews or writing them yourself will eventually cost you the profile.
What does local SEO look like when your market has a season?
In a place like the Algarve, search demand for local businesses is not flat. It climbs, holds and falls away, and everyone's visibility problem arrives at the same moment.
The trouble is that local SEO has a lead time. Profile changes take a while to settle. Reviews accumulate at the speed of actual customers. New pages need to be found and indexed. Starting the work when the season starts means the work lands after it.
There is a smaller version of the same problem that costs money every year. Opening hours. Walk through the profiles of any seasonal town in high summer and a good number still show the winter schedule, or show open when the door is locked. Being open at the moment someone searches was factor number five on that list, and Google has a field for holiday and seasonal hours that almost nobody fills in. Someone standing outside at nine in the evening does not leave a bad review about your hours. They just go somewhere else, and Google notices that they did.
When is local SEO not your problem?
If you sell nationally and ship, local SEO is largely beside the point. Put the effort into ordinary search instead.
If you already appear for your business name and for everything you sell, and the phone still doesn't ring, then visibility isn't what's broken. Something between seeing you and contacting you is, which usually means the website. If the traffic used to arrive and stopped, that is a different diagnosis again. More local SEO will bring more people to the same place they are currently leaving.
Where to start
In order, because the order is most of the value:
Claim the profile and complete it properly, beginning with the primary category and the secondary ones.
Fix the hours, including the holiday exceptions.
Ask your recent customers for reviews and reply to every review you have.
Give each location or service area a page that was actually written for it, on a site that can carry it.
Then, and only then, look at links, citations and press.
Most businesses do that list backwards.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between SEO and local SEO?
Ordinary SEO is about ranking pages. Local SEO is about ranking a business in a specific place, and the thing being ranked is mostly your Google Business Profile. The two overlap, because a healthy site supports the profile, but the levers are different and so is the order you pull them in.
Can I rank in a city where I don't have an address?
Not in the map pack, no. Distance is a ranking factor and Google verifies addresses. What you can do is rank in ordinary results for that city with a page written properly for it, and register a service area on your profile if you genuinely travel to customers.
How long does local SEO take?
Profile work can move things within weeks, sometimes days, because you are correcting information Google already wants. Reviews and prominence take months, because they depend on real customers and real mentions accumulating. Anyone promising a fixed timeline hasn't seen your starting position.
Do I still need a website?
Yes, though not for the reason most people assume. In the Whitespark ranking, the first website factor appears at number seventeen. Its bigger job is what happens after someone finds you, when they want to check you're real and work out whether to call.
How many reviews do I need?
There is no threshold. The useful comparison is the businesses currently ranking above you for your main search, because that is the bar in your market. Look at how many they have and how recent the last one is.
Should I do this myself or hire someone?
The first two items on the list above are genuinely a do-it-yourself job, and you should do them before paying anyone, because an agency's first invoice should not be for filling in a form you could have filled in. The parts worth outsourcing are the ones that need judgement about your market, sustained attention over months, and someone who will tell you when local SEO is not your bottleneck.
If you're not sure whether your visibility problem is a local one, tell us what you sell and where, and we'll tell you what we see. It's also most of what our marketing services start with.