Local search is where a small business meets somebody who already wants to buy. The person typing is usually nearby, often on a phone, and often ready to call. That makes local visibility worth organising properly rather than leaving to chance.
This guide works from what Google documents publicly rather than from folklore. It is written for a business that sells within a town, a city or a region: a shop, a trade, a practice, an agency, a group with several branches. Regulated professions have narrower room for manoeuvre and should check their own rules first.
What Google ranks locally, and on what basis
Google's own help explains that local results are ranked on three things: relevance (how well a profile matches what was searched for), distance (how far the business is from the searcher or from the area searched) and prominence (how well known the business is, judged from what Google finds across the web — links, articles, directories, reviews). The same page states plainly that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking (Google Business Profile help).
Three practical consequences follow.
- Distance is not negotiable. A business on a ring road will not rank like a town-centre address for somebody standing in the town centre.
- Relevance is mostly earned through declared information — category, services, hours — and through the content of your website.
- Prominence is built outside your own pages: citations, local press, partners, reviews. It is the slowest part, and nobody can shortcut it for you.
One distinction is often missed. The local pack — the map with a short list of businesses beneath it — and the ordinary organic results are two separate displays, fed by signals that overlap without being identical. Ranking first in one does not put you in the other. Paid placement through Google Ads is labelled as advertising and sits outside local ranking altogether.
The Business Profile is the foundation
Your Business Profile — the listing once managed as "Google My Business", now handled directly in Search and Maps — is the first piece of work. Google's guidelines for representing your business are explicit on two points that cost people their listings every year: the name must be the real-world name, without added keywords, town names or straplines, and there must be one profile per location, with limited exceptions for distinct departments and for individual practitioners within a practice (Google's guidelines).
The rest is thoroughness rather than cleverness: a primary category chosen with care, secondary categories that reflect real services, hours kept current including bank holidays, attributes filled in, recent photographs, and a link to the relevant page of your site rather than the home page.
One feature has gone. Messaging and call history within the Business Profile were switched off on 31 July 2024 (Google's announcement). If you relied on either to receive enquiries, you need another route: a phone number, a short form, or a booking link.
Completeness is far from universal. French data gives an order of magnitude: in the France Num 2025 barometer (Direction générale des Entreprises, 11,021 small and medium French businesses surveyed between 26 March and 18 April 2025), 65% reported a website but only 50% a free directory listing of the Google My Business type (France Num, 2025). Those figures describe France alone and no British equivalent should be inferred. They do suggest a complete, maintained profile is still an inexpensive way to stand apart.
Name, address, phone: consistency before volume
NAP — name, address, phone — is the triplet Google cross-checks between your site, your profile, directories and partner sites. The aim is not to pile up listings. It is to avoid contradictory versions: an old address still showing in a trade directory, a switchboard number replaced two years ago, two spellings of the trading name.
| Where | What must match | How often to check |
|---|---|---|
| Business Profile | Legal or trading name, address, phone, opening hours | At every change, then quarterly |
| Website (footer, contact page, legal notices) | Same wording, same number format | At every change |
| General and trade directories | Address and phone number | Annually |
| Social profiles, booking platforms | Address, phone, link to the site | Annually |
A spreadsheet listing everywhere you appear is enough. It is dull work. It is also what stops a customer arriving at a door that is no longer yours.
The website: service areas and pages per town
A page per town earns its place only if it holds something specific: jobs or clients there, travel times, local constraints, named partners, different hours. Duplicating one text and swapping the place name produces thin pages, hard to maintain and of no use to a reader. Build a solid "areas we cover" page first, then add a page per town as you accumulate material. That is how we approach SEO content generally.
Plan the mobile journey as well. Local searches are frequently made on a phone, in the street, one-handed. A tappable phone number, a directions link and legible opening hours are worth more than a carousel. A UX audit of the enquiry path tells you more than an opinion will.
Reviews: getting them without cheating
Reviews count twice: in the ranking, and in the customer's decision. Google permits you to ask for reviews, but prohibits offering anything in return — payment, a discount, a free product or service in exchange for a review, or for the removal of a negative one (Google's prohibited and restricted content policy). Consumer protection law in many markets treats fake and incentivised reviews as a misleading practice, so the exposure is not only algorithmic.
What works over time is simpler. Ask when the job has just been finished. Give a short link rather than instructions. Reply to every review, including the bad ones: a calm, factual reply to a complaint reads as well to a prospective customer as a perfect score does.
Structured data: what it does and does not do
LocalBusiness mark-up describes your business for search. name and address are required; telephone, geo, openingHoursSpecification and priceRange are recommended (Google Search documentation). A minimal block on a contact page looks like this.
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "LocalBusiness",
"name": "Trading name exactly as used on the shopfront",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "14 High Street",
"addressLocality": "Norwich",
"postalCode": "NR2 1AB",
"addressCountry": "GB"
},
"telephone": "+44 1603 000000",
"url": "https://example.co.uk/contact/"
}
</script>Two limits are worth knowing. Reviews you control yourself, on your own site or through an embedded widget, do not qualify for star ratings on a LocalBusiness or an Organization. And mark-up that contradicts the visible page exposes you to a manual action.
The mark-up does not feed your Business Profile either, and it will not correct a wrong address in Maps. They are separate systems: an error in the profile is fixed in the profile. Checking that the two agree belongs in a technical SEO audit, not in a monthly content plan.
Several locations, or one service area
Two very different situations hide behind "we cover the whole region".
Several real addresses. Every location where staff meet customers during the stated hours is entitled to its own profile. Give each branch a page with its own contact details, team and hours, linked from a single "where to find us" page. Virtual offices and mail-forwarding addresses are not accepted.
No premises open to the public. A plumber working from home should hide the address and declare a service area instead. Google allows up to 20 service areas — towns, postcodes or regions — and advises keeping the whole area within about two hours' travel of the business (Google help). Hybrid businesses, which both receive customers and travel to them, can show an address, hours and a service area together.
In neither case does a wide declared area create visibility in distant towns. Distance remains a ranking factor whatever you put in the form.
Measuring without fooling yourself
Do not judge your position by typing the query from your own desk: the result depends on where you are and what you have searched before. Look instead at the profile's own metrics — calls, direction requests, clicks to the website — at Search Console for the site's queries and pages, and above all at the number and quality of enquiries you actually receive.
In a small area, two extra calls a week is a result. An average ranking position is not. Our local SEO page sets out how we frame that kind of follow-up.
Then set a rhythm you will keep: details and hours checked each quarter, directory entries once a year, reviews answered weekly. Local visibility decays quietly — a holiday closure nobody updated, a number changed and never propagated — far more often than through anything an algorithm did.
Common questions
Do I need a physical address to appear in Google's local results?
You need a real place of business, even one closed to the public. A business that travels to its customers hides the address and declares a service area instead. Virtual offices and registered-address services with no actual presence are not accepted under Google's guidelines.
Can I pay Google for a better local ranking?
No. Google's help states that there is no way to request or pay for a better position in local results. Google Ads lets you buy advertising visibility, labelled as such, but it does not change how the organic local results are ordered.
How many towns can one Business Profile cover?
Google allows up to 20 service areas per profile — towns, postcodes or regions — and advises keeping the whole area within roughly two hours' travel. Declaring a wide area does not make you visible across it: distance between searcher and business is still a ranking factor.
Can I offer a discount or a gift in exchange for a review?
No. Google's policies prohibit offering payment, a discount, or a free product or service in exchange for posting, amending or removing a review. Asking for a review with nothing offered in return is allowed.
Does LocalBusiness structured data improve my Business Profile?
No, they are separate systems. The mark-up describes your business for the pages of your site in search results. It does not update the profile or the information shown in Maps. A wrong address in the profile can only be corrected in the profile.
Should I create a page for every town I serve?
Only where each page carries genuinely different content: local references, response times, constraints specific to that town, distinct contact details. Pages identical apart from the place name help nobody. A well-made "areas we cover" page is often enough to begin with.