LOCAL SEO
On a phone, the map pack is the result page. Getting into it is a different job from ranking a national page, and most of it is housekeeping done consistently rather than anything clever.
Relevance, distance and prominence, in Google’s own framing. You cannot move your premises, so the work goes into the other two.
01
Primary and secondary categories, services, service areas, hours, attributes and photos. The highest-leverage asset you own and usually the least maintained.
02
Volume, recency, rating and the words customers use. A steady monthly trickle beats a one-off push, and replies are read by people as well as machines.
03
Service and area pages with genuine detail, local schema, embedded location data and internal links that make the geography obvious.
04
The same name, address and phone number everywhere, including the listings a previous agency created and nobody has looked at since.
THE HARD PART
This is where most local campaigns fail. The usual approach is a page per town with the name swapped, which Google has recognised as a pattern for years and does not reward.
What works is fewer pages with real substance: jobs you have done there, people you have worked for, and detail that could only have been written by someone who knows the area.
Five towns you genuinely want work in, ranked by search volume against how strong the incumbents are.
Photographed jobs, named streets or districts, and reviews from customers in that area, on the page for that area.
Regional press, chambers, community sponsorship and the county directories that still carry weight.
For businesses with several premises: one profile and one page per location, without cannibalising each other.
LOCAL SEARCH IS MOVING
The answer is assembled from your profile, your reviews, your site and how consistently you are described elsewhere. There is no listing to buy, which is good news for businesses that have done the housekeeping.
MONTH 1
Business Profile rebuilt properly, citations audited and corrected, tracking put in place so calls are attributable.
MONTH 2-3
Service and area pages built with real evidence, local business and FAQ schema, and a review habit the office can sustain.
MONTH 3-6
Regional coverage and community links earned, competitor gaps closed one town at a time.
ONGOING
Grid rankings by postcode, calls and direction requests, plus which assistants now name you.
COMMON QUESTIONS
Anything not covered here, ask us directly and you will get a straight answer before any proposal.
Profile and review work often moves things within six to eight weeks. Competing for the busiest terms across several towns usually takes four to six months, and depends heavily on how established the current top three are.
Yes, but not with a thin page per town. It takes genuine evidence of work there, local authority signals and patience. We will tell you which of your target towns are realistic and which are not worth the budget.
For the map pack, you need either premises or a defined service area with a verified profile. A service-area business can rank well, though typically across a smaller radius than a business with a shopfront.
Ask at the point the job is finished and the customer is pleased, with a link that takes two taps. A small steady habit run by the office beats any automated campaign.
A handful of county and trade directories still are. Most are not, and paying for a hundred low-quality citations does more harm than good.
Yes, and they share most of the foundation. The difference is that local work weights the profile, reviews and geography, while national work weights authority and content depth.
How we work across Buckinghamshire and the Thames Valley.
The sector where local search decides almost everything.
Local search for single-location and service-area businesses.
FREE SEO & AEO AUDIT
Send your domain and we will send back a written audit: ranking and click-through gaps, technical blockers, and how often the answer engines cite you. No cost, no obligation, no automated PDF.
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