When someone searches “dentist near me” or “car service Plovdiv”, Google shows a map with a few businesses and a list of results. Local SEO is the work of giving yourself a fair chance of appearing there for the searches that matter to you.
Google is unusually open about how this works. Its help page on improving local ranking names three factors, and it states that there’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. Anyone who promises you a guaranteed position in the map is promising something Google says can’t be bought.
The three factors Google names
Relevance is how well a profile matches what someone searched for.
Distance is how far the business is from the person searching. If they don’t share their location, Google uses what it knows about it.
Prominence is how well known the business is. Google says links from other websites and the number and rating of your reviews both contribute.
You can’t change distance. Everything below is about relevance and prominence, across two places: your Google Business Profile and your website.
Relevance: say clearly what you do and where
On your profile. Pick an accurate primary category, list your services, and keep hours and details current. The specifics, including Google’s rules on names and categories, are in our Google Business Profile checklist.
On your website. Give each main service its own page that explains it properly. Put the service and the town in the page title and main heading where that’s true, for example “Boiler repair in Burgas”. Name the areas you actually cover in the text. A visitor, and a search engine, shouldn’t have to guess where you work.
Be careful with location pages. Google’s spam policies name doorway abuse, including “multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page.” Twenty copies of the same page with the town name swapped is the classic version. Before creating a page for a place, ask whether it can contain something specific to that place: a real address, the team that works there, projects completed nearby, local prices or travel details. If it can’t, mention the area on your main service page instead.
Service-area businesses. If you visit customers rather than receive them, hide your address on the profile and set service areas instead. Google allows up to 20, and says the overall area shouldn’t extend beyond about two hours’ drive from your base.
Prominence: give Google and customers reasons to trust you
Reviews. Ask every customer, make it easy with a review link, and reply where you can add something. Don’t offer anything in return and don’t ask only the happy ones; both break Google’s rules.
Links and mentions. A link from your trade association, a supplier’s “where to buy” page, a local news story about a project, a sponsorship of a local club. These are real-world signals of a real business. Avoid buying links or listing yourself on hundreds of low-quality directories.
Consistent details. Keep your business name, address and phone number identical on your website, your profile and the main directories in your sector. Google’s ranking page asks you to keep your information complete and current. Conflicting versions around the web work against that, and they confuse customers too.
Other maps. Bing has its own listing service, Bing Places for Business, and Microsoft’s guidance for its AI answers suggests local businesses keep their address, hours and contact details current there. It’s worth claiming.
Help Google read the details
Add LocalBusiness structured data to your contact or location page. It’s a small block of code that states your name, address, hours and other details in a machine-readable form. The only required properties are name and address, and the markup should match what the page actually shows.
How to check progress honestly
Searching for yourself from your office tells you little. Local results depend on where the searcher is, so what you see at your desk isn’t what a customer across town sees.
Better sources:
- Google Business Profile performance. The Performance section shows the searches used to find you, plus calls, direction requests and website clicks.
- Google Search Console. Look at queries that include your town or “near me”, and which pages they land on.
- Your own enquiries. Ask new customers how they found you and note it down.
Compare month on month, and remember seasonal businesses swing.
Local search is one part of our SEO and search visibility work. If you’re not showing up for the searches that bring customers, tell us your area and what you do and we’ll show you where the gaps are.