Be the business that shows up when someone nearby needs you right now

The profile is the single highest-leverage asset in local search, and it is almost always the most neglected.

• Primary and secondary category selection based on what actually converts in your market
• Services, products and attributes completed rather than left to defaults
• Hours, holiday hours and special hours kept accurate — a wrong closure costs a real customer
• Photo and video cadence, geotag hygiene and owner-uploaded imagery
• Q&A seeded with the questions your team already answers by phone every week
• Posts and updates where they earn attention, skipped where they do not

Search engines cross-check your details across the web. Contradictions weaken confidence in who and where you are.

• Audit of primary aggregators, core directories and industry-specific listings
• Correction or suppression of duplicate and outdated listings
• A single canonical NAP format documented and used everywhere afterwards
• Ongoing monitoring, because directories drift back without supervision

Local intent is different from national intent. The winning terms are usually less glamorous and far more specific.

• Emergency and immediate-need language separated from research-phase language
• Suburb, neighbourhood and colloquial place names your customers actually use
• Competitor gap analysis at the map-pack level, not just organic listings
• Mapping every target term to exactly one page to prevent self-competition

A single ranking number for local search is close to meaningless. Position changes with the searcher's location.

• Grid-based tracking across a defined radius per location
• Visibility reported by distance band so you can see reach honestly
• Competitor movement tracked on the same grid
• Change annotated against the work that shipped that month

Reviews are earned through process, not hope — and the rules about how you ask are not optional.

• Request built into the moment a job or matter closes, where satisfaction is highest
• Channel-appropriate asks — SMS, email or in-person handoff
• Response templates for positive, mixed and negative reviews, with escalation paths
• No incentives, no gating, no filtering, no fabricated reviews — ever

How your pages are organised determines whether local relevance concentrates or evaporates.

• One page per real location with genuinely local content
• Service pages kept distinct from location pages
• Service-area pages only where there is substantive local proof to put on them
• Internal linking designed to stop pages competing for the same query

The unglamorous layer that decides whether the rest of the work can be read properly.

• Titles and meta descriptions written for click-through, not keyword density
• Heading hierarchy that reflects the page's real structure
• Image compression, dimensions and descriptive alt text
• Core Web Vitals on mobile, where almost all local search happens

Structured data tells search engines what you are in a machine-readable way — where it genuinely applies.

• LocalBusiness or the correct specific subtype per location
• Geo coordinates, opening hours specification and service area markup
• Service, FAQ and breadcrumb schema where the page supports it
• Validation on every deployment — broken schema is worse than none

Prominence is partly a function of who in your area references you. This is slow work by design.

• Suppliers, trade bodies, chambers and professional associations
• Local sponsorships and community involvement you would do anyway
• Local press and neighbourhood publications with a real reason to mention you
• No purchased links, no private blog networks, no reciprocal link schemes

If you cannot tell which enquiries came from where, every budget decision afterwards is guesswork.

• Tracking numbers with dynamic insertion that preserves NAP consistency
• Call recording and outcome tagging where your jurisdiction permits it
• Hidden source fields on every form, tied to page and campaign
• Enquiries routed into your CRM with attribution attached

Measurement is set up before the work starts, so improvement can be evidenced rather than asserted.

• Search Console property verification and sitemap submission
• Coverage, indexing and query monitoring per location
• GA4 events for calls, forms, bookings and direction requests
• A monthly report a business owner can actually read

Groups fail differently from single sites. The problems are governance and cannibalisation, not effort.

• Profile ownership, user permissions and a change-control process
• Consistent naming and category strategy across the estate
• Per-location reporting on identical definitions so comparison is fair
• Rollout sequencing so the strongest sites do not starve the newest