What is local SEO, and how do I actually do it?
The short answer
Local SEO is the work that decides whether you appear when somebody nearby searches for what you sell. It runs on three things: a complete verified Google Business Profile, details that are identical everywhere they appear, and pages that answer the specific questions people in your area type. Most of it is free, none of it is technical, and the profile matters more than your website.
On this page
What it is
Ordinary SEO is about ranking for a topic. Local SEO is about ranking for a topic in a place — and the mechanics are different enough to be worth separating.
When someone searches "coffee near me" or "plumber in [town]", the results are assembled from different signals than a general search: proximity, the completeness of your business listing, whether your details agree with themselves across the web, and what other people say about you.
Your website is part of it. It is not the biggest part, which surprises most people.
The three things that matter
1. Your Google Business Profile
For a local business this is the single highest-return thing available, and it is free.
It determines whether you appear on the map at all, and the map appears above the ordinary results for local searches. Someone choosing between three cafés is choosing from a map panel before any website enters the picture.
What to do, in order of impact:
- Claim and verify it. An unverified profile is heavily limited.
- Set the primary category precisely. "Lebanese restaurant" rather than "restaurant" — this determines which searches you are eligible for at all.
- Fill every attribute. Outdoor seating, parking, wheelchair access, wifi. These are used as filters, and a blank field cannot match a filter. You are excluded from searches you never see.
- Add real photographs, including the exterior, which helps people find your door.
- Set special hours for public holidays, which is a separate field from regular hours.
2. Consistent details everywhere
Your name, address and phone number should be character-for-character identical across your website, your Google profile, social bios, delivery platforms and every directory that lists you.
Search engines cross-check these. Disagreement lowers confidence, and confidence is part of ranking. The usual culprits are an old suite number, a phone number that changed, a name with and without "The", and a listing someone else created years ago with the wrong address.
This is tedious and free, and it is the second-biggest lever after the profile.
3. Pages that answer local questions
Here is where your website does its work — not as a brochure, but as a set of answers.
Every question you get asked twice a week is a page or a clearly headed section: do you have parking, do you do gluten free, are you open on Sunday, do you deliver to [neighbourhood]. Those are the phrases people actually type, and a page that answers one can be returned for it.
Generic pages cannot. "Welcome to our restaurant" answers nothing and competes with everyone.
What matters less than people think
Keyword density. Repeating "best plumber London" does not help and reads badly to humans.
Your domain ending. A country domain is a mild signal, not a mechanism. Your profile and address do that work.
A blog for its own sake. Only useful if it is answering real questions. Publishing weekly filler is a cost with no return.
Meta keywords. Ignored for many years. If someone offers to optimise them, that tells you something about the rest of their advice.
Reviews, which sit across all three
Reviews affect local ranking and they affect whether someone chooses you once you appear. Both.
Ask for them, at the moment of visible satisfaction, and make it one tap. Reply to all of them, briefly, including the bad ones — a business that replies reads as attended, to people and to Google.
Do not incentivise them. Offering anything in exchange breaches Google's policies, and the consequences range from removed reviews to a penalised listing.
A realistic order of work
- Claim, verify and complete the Google Business Profile — an afternoon
- Fix every inconsistent listing — a few hours, spread out
- Make sure your menu or price list is real text, not an image
- Add the three pages answering your most-asked questions
- Start asking for reviews, consistently
- Then, and only then, worry about anything technical
Most businesses do this list backwards, starting with a website rebuild and never getting to the profile. The profile is free and works in days. The rebuild is expensive and, on its own, changes very little about whether you appear on that map.
Where the website actually earns its place
The order of work above is right, and it deliberately puts the website last. It is worth being precise about what the site does contribute, because "the rebuild changes very little" is true and frequently over-read.
The profile gets you onto the map. The site is what happens immediately afterwards: somebody taps through and decides. And a handful of specific site facts feed the ranking directly — the name, address and phone matching the profile exactly, a page that answers the actual search, hours that are right, and a page that loads before the person gives up.
Every one of those is maintenance rather than design. They go wrong slowly, in the ordinary course of a business changing, and they go wrong permanently when correcting them needs somebody else. That is the site-side half of local SEO, and it is the half Helm is built to hold: the details stay right because keeping them right takes a minute rather than a job.