Local SEO

Local SEO & Google Business Profile Management

We manage Google Business Profiles for local service businesses — so you show up in the map pack, not page three.

Most local businesses lose customers before anyone visits their website. The decision happens in the map pack — three listings, chosen on category, proximity, reviews and activity. We manage that surface for you: profile accuracy, review replies, Local Posts, citations and reporting, handled as an ongoing service with a human approving every published change.

TL;DR - In one paragraph

Local SEO is the work of ranking in Google's map pack and local results. The centre of it is your Google Business Profile — the listing Google shows before your website. We optimize and maintain that profile for clients under a written engagement, using Google's official Business Profile APIs, with every published change approved by a person first.

Website vs Business Profile

A website gets found. A Business Profile gets chosen.

Ranking a website and ranking a Business Profile are different jobs. Organic SEO is about pages, links and content. Local SEO is about a listing: whether your primary category is right, whether your hours are accurate, whether reviews are recent and answered, whether the profile is active.

Google decides the map pack on relevance, distance and prominence. You cannot change distance. You can change everything else — and most businesses never touch it after the day they claimed the listing.

Doing this properly across many clients by hand is hours of repetitive work: checking categories, drafting review replies, publishing posts, chasing NAP inconsistencies across directories. We built internal tooling on Google's official APIs so that work is drafted quickly and reviewed carefully, rather than done slowly or not at all.

What we cover

What local SEO management covers.

Google Business Profile optimization

Primary and secondary categories, services, hours (including holiday hours), attributes, description and photos — corrected and kept current.

Review management

We monitor new reviews and publish owner replies. Every reply is written for the specific review and approved by a person. We never incentivize, gate, or solicit reviews off-platform.

Local Posts

Offers, events and updates published to your profile on a regular cadence, so the listing reads as active.

Citations & NAP consistency

Your name, address and phone made identical across directories, with duplicate listings claimed and merged.

Service & area pages

Genuinely distinct pages for each service and each area you serve — never templated duplicates.

Reporting

Monthly reporting on calls, direction requests, searches and website clicks, pulled from the Business Profile Performance API — leads and calls, not vanity rankings.

How we work

How we manage profiles responsibly.

We manage other people's Google listings, so how we do it matters as much as what we do. Every claim below is true of the platform as we actually run it.

Client authorization

We access a Business Profile only after the owner explicitly grants access through Google’s own authorization screen. Each client’s credentials are encrypted and isolated from every other client’s.

Human approval on every write

Nothing publishes automatically. Review replies, Local Posts and profile edits are drafted, checked, and published only after an operator approves them.

Policy guardrails

Automated validators block keyword-stuffed business names, review gating, incentivized reviews, and doorway pages before an item can even reach approval.

Official APIs only

We use Google’s Business Profile APIs. No scraping, no unofficial access, no credential sharing.

Full audit trail

Every published change, approval and access grant is logged immutably, so you can see exactly what was changed, when and by whom.

Reporting cadence

Monthly reporting focused on calls and leads, with the underlying data available on request.

What we audit

Twenty-eight signals across five pillars, weighted and scored.

Before we change anything, we score the profile, the website, the reviews, the citations and the tracking. Findings are ranked by how much visibility each one is actually costing — so the first fix is the one that matters most, not the one that's easiest.

Google Business Profile

40%

Verification, primary category, completeness (hours, description, attributes), services listed, posting cadence, photo freshness, performance trend.

Website

20%

HTTPS, titles and meta descriptions, valid LocalBusiness schema, visible NAP, service pages, area pages, tap-to-call, embedded map, XML sitemap, Core Web Vitals.

Reviews

18%

Review count, average rating, review velocity, owner reply rate.

Links & Citations

14%

NAP consistency across directories, duplicate listings, core directory coverage, local backlinks.

Tracking

8%

GA4 connected, Search Console connected, call and lead tracking live.

Scores are banded red / amber / green — green at 75 and above, amber from 45, red below 45.

Run the free local visibility self-audit →
Frequently asked

Practical questions about local SEO and Google Business Profiles.

Local SEO is the work of getting a business to appear in Google’s map pack and local search results — the listings that appear above the normal blue links when someone searches for a service near them.

Regular SEO ranks web pages, using content and links. Local SEO ranks a listing, using category accuracy, proximity, reviews and profile activity. They overlap, but the levers are different. A business can rank well organically and still be invisible in the map pack.

It’s the listing Google shows for your business on Search and Maps — name, category, hours, photos, reviews, and buttons to call or get directions. For most local searches it is the first and often only thing a customer sees. Many of them never reach your website at all.

Yes. You grant us access through Google’s official authorization screen, and you can revoke it at any time. We never see or store your Google password, and your credentials are encrypted and kept isolated from every other client.

No. Every published change — review replies, posts, profile edits — is approved by a person before it goes live. We agree the tone and the boundaries with you up front.

We help you ask customers properly, at the right moment. We do not buy, incentivize, gate, or filter reviews. All of those violate Google’s policies and risk your profile being suspended — the opposite of what you’re paying for.

Profile corrections can shift visibility within weeks. Review velocity, citation cleanup and content take longer — typically three to six months to compound. Anyone promising the map pack in thirty days is guessing.

Calls, direction requests, searches and website clicks from your Business Profile, alongside leads. We report on what generates customers, not on vanity keyword positions.

Get started

Book a free 20-minute local visibility review.

We'll look at your Business Profile, your reviews and your website, and tell you the three things costing you the most visibility. No obligation.